J.E. Sawyer

She forfeited the benefit of the doubt by making a drive-by complaint.

If you include Ol' Painless, it's a pretty easy argument to make. It has effectively endless repair and ammo resources available across the wasteland. Used from a HIDDEN state, it annihilates most targets in one shot. Sneak attack critical = tons of armor-bypassing damage. Add in Better Criticals and it's even deadlier. It also has 0 spread (though the 0.3 of the regular hunting rifle is good enough in most circumstances).

Looks like I was a bit off: Quo nemo sequi potest instead of Qua nullus sequi potest. The mystery has been solved w00tlez.

Possum is irregular. I think it should be "Qua nullus sequi potest". nullus = masc. nom. sing. potest = 3rd person sing. pres. indicative sequi = (complimentary) pres. infinitive But I'm following up with a friend who has an MA in Latin.

We're fixing it.

We're on it.

BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD.

If it means DICE could make Rallisport Challenge 3, I'm all for it.

Amon Tobin - Theme From Battery

Why didn't you just advance time?

Melnibon

I thought the Witcher: EE was pretty good, though I only played about 15 hours of it. It's certainly uneven, but I thought it was a good game overall, especially for such a young developer (RED PROJECT specifically).

This explains the motivation for every single thing he said.

I can't speak for anyone else at Obsidian, but I'd like to work on a smaller game with less of a focus on being cutting edge and more of a focus on really good mechanics. Personally, I've always thought it would be a lot of fun to work on a turn-based, top-down/"iso" Delta Green game. I think there are still good platforms for such games on XBLA or through Steam.

I will always be jealous of any company that has enough money to work on a project for six years. But it's more of a "no duh" statement: Blizzard and Valve made great games in the 90s that sold well, invested that money in smart technology, and continue to dominate because of it. It has little to do with "being cool" and a lot more to do with being successful and using that success to stay dominant. That's a question for the owners. I just work here.

Both companies had previous successes that allowed them to develop their technology over long periods of time, and they were developed during a period of relatively low-cost development. Battle.net was pretty meager when it launched, and Steam took years to develop and become stable. That is, both companies were big before their technologies were big. Few game companies have the resources to develop and maintain systems like Battle.net and Steam concurrently with the games they are developing. Of course, Steam offers PC-based developers a nice online distribution method, but a portion of that income is going straight back to Valve. My point is that Blizzard and Valve focus on PC development because they have long-standing and/or well-established technologies in place that a) prevent or discourage piracy and/or b) directly generate profit for them. And in the case of Blizzard, their development cycles typically eclipse console cycles, so it doesn't make much sense to develop for consoles. In the past six years, I have not interacted with a publisher (other than Atari for NWN2 -- since that tech wasn't going on a console in that time frame) who wanted anything less than three SKUs for a title: PS2/Xbox/PC or PS3/Xbox360/PC. They all want the PS3/Xbox360 and they all want a PC SKU.

A company with online verification/monthly subscriptions and a company with its own online distribution system.

Party-based fantasy RPG with overhead camera/abstracted combat vs. single-character contemporary espionage RPG with close camera/shooter combat. Hrmery indeed.

1. Ones that force me to change how I was doing things or how I was thinking about things. If I were dealing with an enemy that behaved in a very specific way, I will eventually adopt a general tactic for dealing with them. If a new enemy type with dramatically different behavior were introduced into the mix, it would force me to reconsider how I'm deal with each enemy individually. Similarly, plotlines and story elements that turn over time (not with a violent twist, but ones that generally become more nuanced as they progress) are more appealing to me. When everything at the end of a plotline is as it seemed to be at the beginning, I am disappointed. 2. I think games should be internally consistent in tone and "realism". That isn't to say that I think games should be realistic, but if they strive for a certain level of realism in one area, that should be consistent in other areas. I think water and food sources/sources of income/whatever are great not only for being "realistic" (which in itself is of arguable value) but they can provide a context for what characters do in a world. If people live in a town with a big lumber industry, lots of folks can go work at that during the day and can have plotlines that relate back to this very basic element of how the area works. 3. It depends on the game, but generally I fall somewhere in the middle. One or two-shot kills aren't necessarily satisfying for me unless it's some sort of specialized weapon like a sniper rifle from stealth, etc. I can enjoy games like the original Ghost Recon but I usually don't like games where you're just pounding away on enemies for a long time. So I guess I lean toward higher lethality/quicker battles. 4. More time exploring, but mostly because I approached the game as something I absolutely needed to understand in its entirety. Generally, I am not very quest-motivated in games. I usually just want to look around and do a variety of things. 5. Mechanically I think they are becoming more mainstream, which isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as the mechanics are solid. Atmospherically, I think they are doing well compared to their predecessors (especially the original Bioshock). I also think the newer games are a lot easier overall, but I think anyone who has played all of them would probably agree on that. 6. Devil May Cry 4: Very well-executed mechanics, polished gameplay and cinematics. Very repetitive, unfortunately. Witcher: Enhanced Edition: It had problems here and there, but there were a lot of interesting choices to be made throughout the game and you usually felt their impact somewhere down the road. Also I tend to really like lower-magic settings. Castle Crashers: Basic gameplay and a cool art style, well-executed. There are probably others but those are the ones that stick out.

RPGs: Rated E for Everyone.

Players are incentivized to exploit every XP source to gain the most XP. Instead of performing actions because they are inherently enjoyable, they perform them to be as high level as they possibly can be. If the developers want to be "egalitarian", every source of XP has to be monitored, analyzed, charted, and continually balanced throughout the dev cycle. The only cases where I have seen this be successful are cases where "action" XP rewards are so infintessimal compared to quest XP that they are on the scale of a nickel vs. a $100 bill. I.e. the rewards are effectively "feel good" nods to sacred RPG conventions that are statistically irrelevant to advancement. Player attachment to XP for kills is one of the most baffling phenomena of RPG traditions. It makes me wonder how people are able to play "non RPGs" where you don't get XP for killing things.

That's more of a problem with quest design in general than with games where quests are the only way to receive XP.

What is a "natural" approach to quests?

No sorry this is actually going to be Fallout: New Beardsas.