Matthew Rorie

Can you say Scrin spinoff? I guess they have to take into account the need to have an expansion pack. I bet the Scrin will come back for that.

It's just bizarre that they haven't been mentioned at all except for one tiny portion of the GameSpot QA. I thought they were interesting enemies, and moreover were an interesting addition to the storyline. But it seems like they're being heavily de-emphasized, unless they're saving them for a reveal down the line.

There's also a GameSpot QA:

No mention of the Scrin at all? Were they retconned? I have to admit I liked CNC3 a bunch. It's too bad they're apparently going to use the co-op mechanics from Red Alert 3. Too often I found myself capable of just sitting around turtling while my AI teammate went off and killed everybody in the mission, OR my teammate would be completely ineffectual in a mission, except as a distraction. So it didn't work very well in the single-player portion of the game, which is all I intend to play. Looking forward to seeing which C-list actors have signed on for the cinematics.

I feel you on the logic of scythes. They probably would not be good in real life for getting critical hits on anything stronger than wheat. But they do look cool.

I was pretty straightforward and went with a Weapon Master for Scythes until I got all of the Weapon Master bonuses, then I forget what I multi-classed into. But damn. Critting with Scythes (5x damage!) lets you blow through a lot of enemies. Although eventually I got to the point where I wanted to spirit eat enemies at 25% health, but would instead walk up to them and instagib them. Had to start beating down the spirit badgers with my fists so they wouldn't die before I could suck up their sweet life energy.

I don't think I can discuss specifics, but the sentiment here is that it would suck for PC players to be locked off from content. So we'll see what we can do.

A new Jedi Knight game would be very cool, but if you were going to make one now you might as well just make Force Unleashed 2, at least from the standpoint of nurturing a franchise. I hope it's Republic Commando 2. The first Republic Commando was criminally underrated.

There are subtitles for all the dialogue in the game, as far as I'm aware. There aren't enhanced subtitles for things like [Explosion] or [Helicopter Swoops By] like you see in some DVD subtitles for the hearing impaired, but all the dialogue is, at least, there in readable text.

I like it when RPG people like our game.

This is a new video, actually - I recorded it on Monday. It is pretty similar to the 1UP video we recorded at E3 (same build), but is more representative of the demo we were giving to the press behind closed doors at E3, instead of an interview format. So the info might not be new to you guys, but it's good to get it on GameTrailers as well. Extra eyeballs and all that.

This is true. Only two weapons can be brought into a mission.

There is a pretty interesting (and lengthy) video of Avellone's keynote at an Australian conference. You can check it here: Chris starts around the 7:00 mark.

There's a fair bit of romantic/sexual tension between Mike and some of his female counterparts/adversaries. This can play out through many conversations and ultimately leads, if the player desires, to more physical interactions with these characters.

It's the latter; we have a menu of missions that you select from in the safehouse. Mike warps to mission, beats up/stealthily passes by a bunch of bad guys, and then you return to the safehouse to check your news, emails, etc., and repeat the process.

Nice vid, but I still don't understand how the hacking minigame is supposed to work. Could someone clarify it for me please? You have a grid of constantly-shifting numbers and letters. You have two strings of code, however, that are static and don't shift. These match up to two strings in the upper boundaries of the grid. You have to match the strings up to the un-changing portion of the grid, overlap them, then lock them in place. Every once in a while, the static parts of the grid will shift to a different place, so you have to match the strings relatively quickly. As the difficulty of hacking increases, the strings become shorter, making them harder to find amidst the large amount of constantly-shifting numbers. It's difficult to describe without a visual aid, honestly, but it's pretty fun to play.

Well, every enemy is easier to take down from behind than with an assault. Assuming you can get close to them without having them see you, you can perform a takedown and they die. An enemy, especially those with a lot of armor, are going to take a few bullets to the body to take out, but a knife to the throat is an instant kill on any non-boss enemy. I think, in general, a good stealthy player that manages to use his skills well is generally going to have a better chance of surviving overall than a run-n-gunner. Not being seen means not being shot, for the most part. The commando route will lead to taking a lot of damage and getting grenades thrown at you and such, which the commando will be better equipped to deal with, but which can still be deadly. If you focus on stealth, you will die more quickly in a firefight (as you're probably wearing quieter but less protective armor), but you should be able to avoid firefights more often than not. The drawback here is that a stealth playthrough is probably a bit slower than a guns-blazing playthrough, because you're going to be watching enemy patrol routes to sneak past them and moving more slowly in stealth mode overall. But if you want to be a ninja, you have to expect a tradeoff or two. We have a few systems that prevent all the enemies in a level from reacting when a single enemy is alerted to your presence, and our passive/activated abilities and gadgets are going to let you correct some of the mistakes that might be made while you're sneaking around. In general, a stealth playthrough is going to require a bit more care than a guns-blazing approach, but we're trying not to make it punishing to the point of not being fun. We also want to allow the player to make a few mistakes along the way without having to do that "oh well, might as well reload at this point" thing. So you get things like Evasion, which makes Mike temporarily undetectable to enemies when he wanders into one of their view ranges (allowing him to quickly get behind cover before they react to him), or the Radio Mimic gadget, which lets you modulate Mike's voice and call in a false alarm signal, thus canceling an alarm that you trip. (Both of these are on cooldowns, so they are not going to let you constantly correct for sloppy play.) So we're trying to ensure that playing stealthy is an appropriate challenge, but not something that is overly punishing. The end goal is, after all, a fun game.

I really like the throatpunch and the takedowns in general. The animation team put some really cool stuff in there that's fun to use.

You can save at a safehouse. You have a checkpoint that's made when you first return to a safehouse in between missions, but if you then go off and buy a bunch of weapons and send a bunch of emails, you can make a save after that, quit and reload, and all the stuff you did in the safehouse will be saved.

That movie was interesting to watch in 2D on cable; I caught a snippet of it a while back. The budget was apparently 60 million, but it often looked cheaper than a Sci-Fi Original movie. Parts of it, like the grapes flying into everyone's faces at the end, were obviously intended to startle in 3D but just seemed pointless in 3D.

If there's another JB to be added, I think we all know .

Just so we're all clear on this, you can make manual saves in this game; just open up the menu, select save game, and you'll create a save game at the last checkpoint. So you're not going to have to play through the entire game on one checkpoint save or anything crazy like that. This is, at any rate, how things work right now. The E3 level has a dialogue at the very beginning of it, and then you're thrown into battle. The checkpoint is placed after the dialogue so that, in case you get killed by an errant grenade or something as soon as the battle begins, we don't ask the player to sit through the dialogue again. Nothing prevents you from reloading a save in the safehouse to try the dialogue again, though, if you wish. However, there's really not much point to reloading saves and playing through dialogues multiple times to find the "right" way through it. Sometimes there might seem to be an immediate benefit to one course of responses to a character, but the real negatives don't show up until later on in the hub, or in the game. Or vice versa; killing someone might seem to be a disadvantage to the player right away, but will reap benefits later on that aren't immediately clear. If players really insist on trying to replay dialogues multiple times to get a "good" result, there's nothing structurally that will prevent you from doing so with savegames, but obviously it's going to be somewhat disruptive to your experience of the story. And in the end, you're probably going to need to play through the game a few times to see all the ways your choices affect the game, so you might as well save yourself some trouble and enjoy the game naturally when you're playing it. But we're not going to make it impossible for people to game the system if that's what you want to do.

Unless I am sorely mistaken, the over-the-shoulder camera footage from E3 was with a character with zero CQC skill. So it's probably not the best showcase for how CQC works against our enemies.

Are you referring to CD-Keys? Am I the only one who has never had a problem with these? Anyhow, the 'back-in-the-day' copy protection schemes that asked you to verify something from the other in-box materials every damn time you loaded the game (and, in some cases, at intermittent points during gameplay) were far more annoying. I think he was more referring to the lengthy save codes for games like the original Metroid on the NES.