J.E. Sawyer

Obsidian superstar Travis Stout did some of the writing for the new Dark Sun.

Thread disappoints. I was hoping this would be a preview by popular jazz magazine DownBeat.

I don't think so. The characters are literally resigned to death until the Protagonist decides, on a whim, to leave the hospital. For the first day after they depart, they have no destination. After that, they do have a goal of sorts, but it's mostly just a context for their conversations. I'm calling it out because the p/Protagonist of the story is only really the protagonist because a) he is called so/is the narrator and b) he starts the journey. He has no real drive or goal other than not to die at home/in the hospital. That's great if you're telling a story and just want some people to talk frequently. I don't think most people would consider it to be a great premise for a player-driven narrative. Many of Alex's complaints revolve around the dominance of the male character over females. One of my responses to this is that typically any video game's protagonist's actions are going to dominate/drive everything around him or her. The less dominant the player is in conversations/action, typically the more players feel like they are being pushed around/railroaded. On a side note, personally I feel that while Narcissu does manage to generate empathy for the characters, Setsumi is not characterized very deeply/is uninteresting to me.

Narcissu isn't interactive though; the viewer really has no active role in what the Protagonist is doing. It's also entirely about two characters who literally have nothing to do but wait around to die.

I'm going to include an "I just want to be friends" minigame that culminates in talking about reality TV and maybe getting a grilled cheese sandwich.

The process of virtually all interactions in video games is transactional. Replace "sex" with any other thing you can cause to happen in a video game and think about how often your interaction with a character continues significantly after you reach the end of a plot/quest chain. The protagonist is often the most active driving force in the game universe (hence the designation), and typically in all relationships the protagonist dominates where the relationship goes. In almost all cases, these relationships are either purely background/informational/chatty or they are part of a quest. Quests are pretty much all transactional. Once both parties have what they want, the protagonist leaves and starts pursuing another quest/plot chain. Remove sex from the equation in AP and you still have a male character effectively running around trying to get people to do what he wants and/or shooting them in the face.

*scraps plans for rust monsters in f:nv*

Dice pools... realism... I remember the last time I played Shadowrun something happened where I rolled like 25d6. "Realism" was not the vibe I was getting. Storyteller/L5R weren't as bad, but I still don't really get why dice pools are inherently better/more realistic.

Scarlet Lake or "Scar-Lay" as she is known by the tabloids.

So does Obsidian superstar Darren Monahan.

Close enough. The content is all correct.

Sorry, but it's pretty much pointless for developers to comment on this. The publisher is more in-tune with when things are expected to release and retailers simply speculate over time. It's been that way for the entire time I've been in the industry and probably worked that way before.

In conversations, Mike's gun is holstered if it makes sense for Mike to have his gun holstered. If he's interrogating someone who's hostile, he may have the person at gunpoint.

Firearm manufacturers tend to be a lot more litigious when a name is attached instead of just a visual representation. Also a lot of the most commonly represented weapons are popular pattern firearms with tons of knock-off versions/variations. E.g. the M1911, Hi-Power, AK-47, etc. So even if something looks like an M1911, it would be hard to prove it's "really" an M1911 (no dude, it's totally a double-stack 10mm!), much less a Colt/Kimber/Springfield/Wesson blah, blah.

In a world with unlimited time, sure.

The majority of role-playing in AP happens in conversations, where guns are out/holstered/aimed/whatever depending on the context of the conversation. The player isn't engaging in free-form role-playing with mooks while running around. Someone brought up Hitman, which is fantastic series. However, the setup is also quite different. In Hitman, the core gameplay defines everything about "your" 47. There is no conversation mechanic. The story proceeds in one direction and takes no turns along the way. Abstracted social stealth is essentially the entire point of Hitman's gameplay.

I ruled the universe with the Vault 101 baseball bat. I killed the first super mutant I encountered, a minigun-wielding dude near Big Town, with it at 4th level. I didn't replace that weapon until I took the shishkebab off of Vance's corpse about six hours into the game. The only melee weapon I used after I got that was Stabhappy. I always used melee weapons in real-time.

However, it doesn't work the other way around; weapons do not give any UI feedback about what skills they use.

If the weapons covered by any given skill had a distinct set of characteristics that made them more or less valuable in different situations, there would still be advantages to buying up multiple combat skills. "A handgun is a good thing to use to fight your way to your rifle." A lot of people I've talked to played Fallout 3 and didn't know what skills governed what weapons. Part of this has to do with UI feedback, but it's telling that several people expected things like sniper rifles and hunting rifles to be covered by Big Guns.

Then why allow someone to buy the Big Guns skill at all at low levels? There's no other skill in the game that has an effective restriction to using it in the second half of the game. If you tagged Science and didn't get to use it for the first seven hours of your first playthrough, wouldn't that be kind of irritating?

I think one of the classic issues I've had with the Fallout series is that the combat skills seem to be balanced around the idea of phased obsolescence. The first Fallout was probably the worst about this, with almost no Big Guns or Energy Weapons for the first half of the game. That is, you're "supposed" to take Small Guns, then Big Guns, then Energy Weapons. If you do something wacky like take Big Guns or Energy Weapons at low level, you suffer. There really aren't any "low-level" Big Guns to speak of, and in the long run, it's hard to justify a heavy investment in them for the reasons CrashGirl mentions: very high weight, enormous ammo consumption, difficulty dealing with targets at long range, especially if they are moving perpendicular to your facing. In F3, you can make up for the Big Guns difference by raising it later in the game and slapping a couple of Size Matter perks on, but it's a high cost for what you get.

Loading the assets would probably be easy, but you'd have to modify the interface to allow you to switch to an unarmed stance and/or intentionally put away whatever weapon you have equipped. Personally, I don't see the point. When you go on missions, you're in environments full of hostiles. Walking around unarmed doesn't really gain you anything. That has more to do with the general design of the game than unequipping weapons.

Unarmed attack animations are just that: attack animations. To be unarmed all the time means that all of Mike's navigation animations (walk, run, crouch, take cover, move in cover, etc.) would have to have an unarmed version loaded into memory with the other weapon navigation stances. Mike's weapon navigation stances aren't loaded when he's hanging out in the safehouse, so he can have an unarmed navigation set loaded. Do really care about this? I think it's pretty minor.

Yep.

Bethesda announced it, not Obsidian.