Wrath of Dagon

Not to me, it felt exactly the same. Anyway, Obsid already did allies in KOTOR 2. And now ME2 has done it. I see a long future of ally gathering for Bio. Edit: Actually I liked the star maps better, because I really did want to see what that Star Forge thing was all about. Who were my allies I didn't care too much, presumably I'd still win. Sure, it would've been cool to have the werewolves fighting beside you, but I wasn't about to slaughter all the elves just for that.

Can there ever be enough furries?

ME3 - The Furry Chronicles

In most, if not all, of those games -it's been awhile so I cannot remember if the examples were this way- you did get a "character" - you are King XYZ, the leader of the great nation of ABC. But that's probably too abstracted to really be considered a PC.

Using that idea in one game is fine. Using it in every game since then - not so much. Like I said, all purpose autopilot. I know why they do it, but that doesn't mean that's the only way a story driven game can be done. Being able to go to their 4 places in any order doesn't do much for me either, I'd rather have a real plot for once.

Hm, Civilization, Masters of Orion, Alpha Centuari maybe? There are lots of choices and consequences you make within those sorts of strategy / exploration / research type games. They don't always have much story to them (although AC did make a nice effort), but they definitely have a wide open ability to choose as you wish and then have consequences to deal with from every choice. But you are not playing a character, are you? The lack of the PC is what makes a strategy game not an RPG, although there's plenty of C&C of course.

What would be an example of a game with C&C that wasn't an RPG?

Calm down, it was just a joke. I'm fine with your jokes, but don't make it look like I said something I didn't.

But in an FPS you usually don't get much choice about your upgrades. Even if an FPS allows some RPGish elements, like Wolfenstein, they're not still not enough of a focus of the game to make it an RPG.

That's part of the player choice, but I'm not sure it's either necessary or sufficient. However all the games referred to as RPG's I'm aware of have some form of that.

To me an RPG is something that has a PC and then it depends on how much player choice the game allows.

I meant actually take a different approach to carry out a mission, not kill/spare someone at the end.

Then what precisely are you waffling on about? My point was that torture often works, since I didn't claim that that was what won Chechnya the rest of the discussion was irrelevant, except that I had to correct the distortion of historical fact.

ME2 has multiple ways to complete quests?

Once more we got Bio's crappy "visit 4 places to find 4 doohickeys" all purpose autopilot plot. They could've made the whole thing a lot more interesting by explaining Loghain's motivation early on. Then a civil war would break out and you could choose which side you wanted to join. Lots of opportunities for political intrigue, spying, betrayal and so on. Also Loghaine being the patriot that he is, could've moved (after Cailan was dead) to save what was left of the Ferelden army, catching the Darkspawn army off-guard and destroying it. That would explain why that huge Darkspawn army didn't just roll over Ferelden in a few days while you were prancing around gathering allies.

They said their team will be small, implying Obsidian's team will be the larger one, thus Obsidian would do most of the work. That of course doesn't mean Obsidian will have creative control, but they're hardly a "consultant".

This certainly accords with what I've heard. Rather than your cheerful but strange notion that the KGB succeeded in Chechneya. I suppose they also succeeded in Afghanistan using the same methods? Then you heard wrong, the second war was every bit as brutal as the first one, except now they actually had a leader who was competent in addition to being ruthless. Afghanistan is much bigger and more foreign to Russians than Chechnya, and still Afghans couldn't win until US went in full bore to help them. Anyway, I'm not arguing for the efficacy of brutality in winning wars, but let's not distort historical fact to make dubious points.

There's no except there, as I'm stating a fact.

That would be I, except I didn't say ME was the worst thing in the world, just the worst Bio game I played by far. I didn't say what Alistair does doesn't make sense, I said unless you use a line which doesn't make sense Alistair acts like a boneheaded jerk.

We have no real clue how many resource they are devoting to it. So the point I'm making is this could have a minimal impact on the games they are developing in studio. Again, it sounds like a consulting job, which can mean a lot of different things but probably is not a full development team. Red Eagle was pretty clear they're only supervising, while most of the development team will be supplied by Obsidian, doesn't sound like consulting to me.

Ignore the troll. Wrex is more like Ordo than Zaeed is. Wrex and Ordo are both mercs from a race of warriors that are slowly dying out because of a destructive war, who are now trying to reunite the Mandalorian Krogan clans. Yeah, except Ordo doesn't keep whining like Wrex. He lost and he accepts it.

You can say that after the Urn of Sacred Ashes quest? Your choice there affects your party big time. How about your choices in/after Landsmeet? Life or death, quite literally, for several of the NPC's. Your choices affect the ending in ways you cannot even imagine at the time you are making them. The Dalish quest had three potential outcomes, and the results of each could not have been more different nor affect the game more. I'm really confused that you would say this about this particular game, since it is the first game I've played where choices have such far-reaching, potentially catastrophic and unpredictable results. The Dalish quest affected the game? How? What I said is choices don't affect how the quest plays out, you still do a long grind and a decision at the end. And they're not great because you can always do the right thing without cost if you want to, nothing new here. As far as being unpredictable, that's why I said they're not very satisfying, for example you have to say something that doesn't make any sense at the end of Alistair sister quest, or else Alistair will act like a boneheaded jerk at the end of the game.

That depends on whether we're including Russia or not. Putin definitely counts. Please don't misquote me without pointing that out, or I'll report you. And Berlusconi is far from being a fascist, you don't even know what a fascist is.

No, your history is faulty, they won through brutal repression, not that I would ever advocate we do the same.

DAO has some choices, but they don't really affect how the quests play out. No matter what, most of the quest is just a grind, and then you make a choice at the end, the new Bio paradigm. Plus there's nothing particularly great about the choices you make, they didn't really feel very satisfying, it's pretty much be a goody two shoes or a jerk once again.