Wrath of Dagon

Carth was betrayed by the person he trusted and respected most, and as a result lost everything that was dear to him, his family. He had a reason to mope. The only thing they copied for Kaiden was the sad tale and the waah, waah. Edit: I thought both Bastila and Carth were great characters, and didn't romance either. Bastila's bitchiness is a feature so far as I'm concerned, what makes her interesting is that she's conflicted between her passions and her duty.

"My hatred for Linkin' Park comes from expecting the next great thing since Limp Bizkit, and getting a piece of half-baked, half-assed garbage instead." You see where you're going wrong there? I see what's wrong with your statement, was Linkin Park formed by former members of Limp Bizkit?

For one thing, remember Carth came first, so it's not like KOTOR copied Kaiden. For another thing, it was probably 5 times more lines. Carth was an interesting, well developed character, with a real history, a history which affected his behavior in the game and was actually part of a fairly major plot point. All Kaiden had going for him is his sad tale of being experimented on as a child, waah, waah, which really had nothing to do with anything else in the game. This perfectly illustrates the kind of thing KOTOR did so well and ME completely failed to do, I'll never understand why people don't see it for themselves.

uh, hyperbole much? No, did you not see my list of reasons? Do you deny any of them? KOTOR was high quality, ME was not, it's as simple as that. It looked to me like it was, of course the graphics were limited by the engine, but art design was top notch and played a purpose throughout. I still love it whenever I run across a KOTOR screenshot. ME was generic props cut and pasted ad nauseum, it created nothing but a feeling of dreariness. No it's not, objectivity is my thing, what did you find worthwhile?

I would say you base the amount of health on a moderate combat character. The heavy combat character will then have a tougher time, but he's better equipped for combat also. Obviously if you mostly play non-combat, health isn't an issue at all, unless you get discovered and decide to fight it out. I don't see why this would me much harder to implement than regenerating health for everyone. Edit: In HL2, I hardly ever ran out of healthpacks when I needed them. Even so, just the fact that I didn't have unlimited health made me more careful about taking damage and conserving health.

My hatred for ME comes from expecting the next great thing since KOTOR, and getting a piece of half-baked, half-assed garbage instead. So the similarity between them are the corridors? The difference is KOTOR had a lot more than spaceport corridors, each planet had its own character and theme, while ME's theme was the future galaxy looks like strip malls and underground garages in various textures of gray concrete. As far as combat, of course it's shooter combat, what else could it possibly be? Since there's nothing worthwhile in the game except combat, that makes it a shooter.

But this is an RPG, not a shooter, so there should be more opportunity to avoid damage. Plus it's just a question of how much health they provide vs how much damage you can be reasonably expected to take. Also in BiA I didn't normally use my men as fodder, I'd be careful to stay in cover and use good tactics. It wouldn't be a bad idea to require you to keep them all alive, except whenever you ordered them into cover, two would stand behind a wall and a third would stand in front of it.

They're nothing alike, the fact that you say this probably means you don't like KOTOR. Quests - Kotor's were great, ME's were crap Characters - Kotor's were great, ME's were crap Dialog - Kotor's was great, ME's was crap Art design - Kotor's was great, ME's was crap Story - Kotor's was great, ME's was crap Leveling up and equipment were also inferior in ME. Is that enough for you?

That's how it started out, but the commercial version is quite different. The original training version can still be unlocked with a cheat code. The commercial version is basically a series of situational puzzles, and on hard difficulty I didn't find it repetitive, because the puzzles get harder and harder.

You mean like ammo? Conserving ammo would have a similar effect to conserving health, so it's a bit redundant, plus it's harder to do it with ammo, since you can usually just switch to another weapon if you run out. At least in Gears there aren't really tactics to going through a level, may be some tactics with winning individual battles. Haven't played the other 2 games. The best example of a shooter where your tactics actually have to include the entire level and you had finite health was the original Brothers in Arms, and it worked very well IMO. And of course that's the way the Deus Ex games worked as well.

see That is to say, those games were good at what they did, but I LIKED the fusion. If you didn't, and that was your only point, then that's grand. My point was that ME is a decent if unspectacular shooter, and a crummy RPG, not to tell you what you should play. In fact my original post wasn't addressed specifically to you at all. As far as fusion, I agree that having character and equipment upgrades in addition to the combat makes it more fun, but that's about it. Edit: Yes, I see I did quote you originally, so perhaps it could be understood as telling you what to do, but that's not really what I meant.

I'm not saying the game will be bad just because of the healing mechanism, it just might be an indicator the game is trying to be more "accessible" and less tactical than I'd like to see. As I said somewhere in the thread, I'm not ready to jump to conclusions based on the little info we currently have.

Time travelling lizards?

Based on what? On how much you've already done in that level and what your objectives are. Obviously it'll vary from game to game. Which is why I think that the health mechanics of DX3 is largely irrelevant. They're relevant unless you planning to take a completely non-combat approach. Often how much health you have left will determine how you will play out the rest of the level, which is a good thing. Plus it's good that there's a possibility of failure, even if it's small and consequences not that severe (having to restart the level if you can't somehow figure out how to make it through with the amount of health left).

I think that's more of a theoretical problem than a real one. You should have an idea how much health you can lose and how much of the level there's still to go and make a judgment whether to redo the fight. Anyway, most games deal with it by distributing health packs through the level, so that you can't use them all up too fast. In an RPG it's often possible to proceed without losing any health, so it's even less of an issue.

But if they do that once, wouldn't they remember to watch their health more closely next time? Besides, it they don't save during the level, when they die they'll have to start over again anyway. Edit: What I do is only save when I'm in relatively good shape, i.e. still have enough health and resources to continue. That way if I die, I just go to the nearest point from which I can proceed reasonably well.

You don't have to get everything perfect, but you have to do well enough to take an acceptable amount of damage. How many times you retry really depends on your skills relative to game difficulty, which is always the case so long as it's possible to die. You may have to retry 1 or 2 times extra to get decent amount of health left, but conserving your resources seems like a good reward for the effort. But it makes sense in an RPG to have to conserve your resources, I don't see a problem with that. No, I'm fine with regenerating health so long as you're fighting a series of unrelated battles, not trying to solve a mission. In particular it works well with more fast paced shooters, less well when there's a tactical element to proceeding through a level. Edit: Note that in Dragon Age forum I actually argued for regenerating health (which is what they're planning apparently) because since combat is normally the only option, the battles would be unrelated, and the rules based nature of battles already imply that you have to think about what you're doing.

Difference is, saving is out of game, and med pacs are in game. To an extent you have a point, if you can't save during the level it makes you careful just like having limited health would do. The problem is, it's far more tedious to start over the level from the beginning and redo everything you've already accomplished successfully than to reload right after the battle if you died or survived but used up so much health you may not make it to the end. The second alternative gives more choices to the player, which I consider a good thing.

FSW is a great game, if you like strategy and shooters, although it's not a shooter. Play it on hard difficulty, or it may get a bit repetitive.

Yeah, that nulifies the fact that I enjoyed the game, having played HL2, Gears of War, Deus Ex, KotoR1/2, BG1/2, Fallout1/2 and Icewind Dale1/2 before it. There's just no way I could play all those games and still enjoy Mass Effect for what it is. I never said it's not enjoyable for what it is, an average shooter with pretty cinematics. I don't see where your post even disagrees with my statement, just with the strawman argument you made up yourself and attributed to me.

It's not really that I want to penalize someone for taking the direct approach (his build would be better equipped to do that anyway), it's that I want an incentive to consider the entire mission as a whole. If you regenerate your entire health back after every gunfight, there's no incentive to be particularly careful about each battle, or to plan ahead. I'm assuming you can save at any time, if you can only save after you finish the mission, it pretty much does the same thing, but I really dislike not being able to save when I want to (unless it's only restricted in combat, which is OK).

Like I said before that's really not true. Your example was healing during combat, I was talking about healing in between combat. I hate games that throw waves of enemies at you non-stop, and DX certainly didn't do that.

Sounds like rationalization if you ask me. Any reason I give you you can call rationalization. Rationalization of what exactly? I want some challenge, not a ridiculous amount of challenge. Having to redo things once in a while is challenge enough for me, but thank you for your advice. That's right, I use my metaknowledge and get through more cleanly, if you don't like that, don't do it. I prefer that to having to set the game to a lower difficulty setting, which is what I do if the game only allows checkpoints.

The problem is you don't have to be careful about preserving your health through the entire mission, so long as you survive each battle your condition at the end does not affect the next battle, so there's no incentive for you to look for alternate paths which might reduce your damage. Instead of the mission being a single entity you have to find your way through, it just becomes a string of independent battles. As far as running out of healthpacks, that's part of the challenge, it's never really been a problem with games which dole out a certain number of healthpacks for a given amount of progress that you make.

So reloading constantly to ensure you successfully complete each encounter optimally is better? Better than proceeding through the game sloppily, yes. I don't always have to reload, but I like to have the opportunity if I need to. You can avoid that situation in either case, the difference is with medkits you have to use your head, with regen it's done for you so you can just plough through.