Sannom

Godlikes aren't demi-gods, and what makes you think that Magran's followers would accept a Magran-godlike with open arms? Maybe they're considered abominations by the faith because they steal a fraction of their god's power or because their existence is the symbol of an old trick played on Magran by some other deity!

Another preview contradicts joystiq on that point. I'm waiting for an Obsidian comment at this point.

I hope that the Joystiq preview is mistaken and that we can create female characters.

Don't bait him/her. As for the question, I'm expecting a wide range of appearances : classic semi-elementals (Genasi), people who are otherwordly beautiful (Aasimar), some who have difformities that seem totally random (Tiefling), people who have a strong environement theme (the lady from the concept art). I'm sure there would be a lot of choices.

According to Josh... somewhere, the first recorded Ciphers were found amongst Orlans, so I'm not sure if they would be the kind to go for 'sophisticated'. We're talking about a race that was so abused in the last centuries that it practically developped ruthlessness and practicality as a part of its genetic make-up!

How is this bad? You've got the color as an indicator of the flavor, and that is what is really important! Who cares if they all have the same shape? You're basically saying that being able to build a warrior as an armor-wearing tearers of hordes or an agile single combat specialist is a bad thing and that instead each archetype should be its own class. For short : I don't get the worry. D&D 3.5 too had its combat and non-combat resources separated, and it worked.

(1) I think it's part of Ammon's dialog, if you manage to make him tell you about his complete history. (2) I would have to replay the OC to ascertain it, but according to TvTropes, you can make him admit that his methods were flawed and that in the end, the only thing he has to show for all this is the blood of his grand-daughter on his hands. You need to have had a high reputation with Shandra though. (3) The guy is fighting an abomination ready to invade the world with an army of undeads, and demons are basically his foot soldiers. Of course that he would take some to the swamp just in case. As for why West Harbor was destroyed... yeah that's about the point when the King of Shadow's forces started to really show themselves and West Harbor is basically on their doorstep.

Number ONE : if memory serves, Ammon wasn't really around after the battle of West Harbor, he was immediately dragged off by one of his contractors. It was Garius who freed him shortly before the beginning of the game, trying to use him to gain more knowledge of the Kind of Shadow, but Jerro managed to escape. Number TWO : Ammon has an ego the size of a whale. Also, the most he managed to get out of Neverwinter the first time was a small amount of soldiers. At this point, he probably thought that he was the only one capable of succeeding in destroying the King of Shadows. One of the main points why I think Ammon was meant to be a deconstruction of Darth Revan as Obsidian painted him in KOTOR 2. Number THREE : he believes they're all dead and a lot of time has passed since he disappeared. Also, he's the kind of guy who tends to forget everything else once he's set on a goal. Number FOUR : he didn't search for them? When he mentions that he lost track of his family, it was during the war, not after. As I already mentionned, he wasn't around after the battle of West Harbor. Number SEVEN : there is dummied-out content that shows that Ammon did not destroy West Harbor. He only walked through it.

You trade some of the monk's specific abilities for the advantages brought by more mundane means. Wearing armor, you're less likely to receive damage, but the trade-off is a smaller pool of resources to use the monk's abilities. Using a weapon enables to do more damage with each hit, but might need for a different use of wound resources. Both concepts are viable, I don't see what's the problem. Your proposed solution sounds terrible, and is in direct contradiction to the goals you've set in the first part of the quote! You're basically saying 'Let's the monk play exactly the same with or without armor after a certain point'. It only keeps the more generic disadvantages of (slower rate of attacks, weaker stealth) while getting rid of all its effects on the specific abilities of the class. There is no choice here! When people asked for the viability of untraditional builds, I'm sure they didn't ask for the invalidation of the traditional way the class is played.

Even if that were true, smarter doesn't mean wiser. Casuals probably stay away from those forums where all the weirdos gather to argue about everything and nothing. As for what kind of character I wouldn't want in a game... no idea. What I don't want is for some characters to take so much of the screen-time and plot-importance that the other characters feel under-developed. Bishop couldn't have been Disney-evil, he had no ambition besides staying unattached. He reminded me more of Hanharr in that respect. Kinda like how Amon felt like a deconstruction of Revan.

That would be 'horrible'. 'Terrible' has come to mean 'awesome' in most cases. But yeah, that trailer doesn't show exciting combat, although I like the aesthetic.

Not sure how excited people should get for the hats, Katarina (Dungeon Siege 3) also had hats in concept arts very similar to those, but she never had any in the game!

I missed that one. Which post was it?

Because HoMM VI was in the continuity of HoMM V and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic? I'm surprised that Ubisoft would ask such a small studio to handle their first foray in the RPG genre, you would think that they would go bigger!

It's an accusation made at every bit of popular culture out there, from video games to books. She focuses n games because that's what she knows best. He replaced Saber and then Krystal was kicked out and then was transformed into a pretty object for Fox to look at. Sarkeesian's point still stands even if she should have filled us in on the whole history of the game. You have seen the post Alanschu was answering to, right? There was nothing in it to indicate that it was related to the Bayonetta video. And speaking of the Bayonetta video, how do I turn off those annoying red boxes that keep popping on the screen?

(1) Like every genre of popular culture out there. Sarkeesian just happens to talk about video games because that's a medium she knows better, being a gamer herself. (2) And how exactly did you come to the conclusion that she was anti-sex? Is she something she said? Views exposed in other pieces? Because from that video, she doesn't strike me as a straw feminist. (3) I've already answered that before : thanks to Sarkeesian's country of residence believing in free speech, Youtube comments on this kind of content always contains their fair share of insults, threats and horrible behavior, and soon the flame ways engulf everything else. There is no point in allowing them. Again, Sarkeesian knows the hobby, she's played video games, she's enjoyed a lot of them and presumably still enjoys a few of them. That Lapierre person would probably expect a gun as a controller as soon as he hears that there are triggers on it! Also, video games may be an easy target for a well-funded association backed by thousands of really well-armed Americans, but Sarkeesian is alone and is easy prey for just a bunch of internet trolls, stalkers and other monstrosities of the Internet. Come on, some people still believes that she hates video games, and that much is not true. You say that, but you still didn't explain why you brand her a radical, you just explained to me what you believe a radical feminist is.

Oppressive countries with censor filters for everything tend to not have a big gaming scene, and so that means that video games are good for the rights of women. It's an equivalence thing, although I always thought the second thing was just one of the many results of the first. My poor attempt at sarcasm being over, I will just say that Chaz is expressing some very true and simple things but tends to obfuscate them because if he was expressing them in their purest form, they would come off really badly. I think he believes that Sarkeesian is a man-hating female supremacist who would like video games to either be completely banned or at the very least sanitized of any sort of content she (and of course her cohorts of feminist hard-liners) deems unacceptable. Hence why he's compared her to terrorist groups.

No. She studies the influence of millenia-old tropes in video games and sometimes express her wishes that the industry would outgrow them. She doesn't make a case that video games are inherently misogynist and that they should be banned and censored. She isn't against free speech. She isn't like the NRA or whatever group you used in your analogy with the 'video games make our kids violent' debate. She isn't a terrorist throwing kangaroo courts for the weak and bullied game industry (seriously, I can't be the only one who thought 'Godwin' at that point, right?). Although it is a fact that women are on average weaker physically than men, we live in a time where it is no longer relevant (in fact, I'm not sure it has been relevant for centuries) except in competitive sports.

Sexism isn't a simple subject, no. Yes, I know, hence why I said that you followed into the steps of the 'opposition'. Don't knock it before you try it. I don't know if there is an english version of Requiem : Chevalier Vampire, but Lady Venus' speech pattern is hilarious.

I agree that video games, like a lot of popular culture, reinforces sexism, which is already present in a lot of ways in our every-day lives. I have a number of reflexes that are simply sexist, even if you would think that they are 'no big'. Games are the same, it's often little things, but it's always tiring and sometimes you wish they had just put in a little bit more effort. See this, right there? Sexism. You call the 'visible' female person you disagree with by her first name, rather than her last name, as if you knew her. You wouldn't do that for a man. A thing I do too from times to times, without realizing it. And why do you do it? Because you're following your interlocutor, like a good sheep, without thinking of the implications. What. Alright, for the record : 'feminism' does not equate 'hatred of men', 'feminist' does not equate 'female supremacist'. And I'm not sure the last thing is a thing outside of fiction, in which 'female supremacy' doesn't even equate 'hatred of men'. I'm looking at you, Lady Venus, you magnificent politically correct bastard!

It's called a reboot. They had already started it in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, they continued with Heroes of Might & Magic 5. You don't need 'reasons' to do it. I never played the game, but seeing others play HoMM 4, I really thought the brand was in need of some re-focusing, with some factions that had no real them or identity to them. Olivier Ledroit brought a coherent visual look, Nival brought back some of the gameplay before the fourth game, etc.

It's funny, I thought that game had the best mouse & keyboard controls of the all the recent PoP. Maybe it was just for the platforming...

To be fair, the two subjects are very different. Violence in popular culture is glorified and glamorized. Some people wants more and more of it, movies and video games have sometimes violence and huge amount of gore as their selling point. We're so permeated by it, how in the world could it have such an impact? A contrario, sexism in games is much more the result of cluelessness, stupidity, laziness, than outright malice or even intent. Maybe we want those people to just get a clue, and so we're particularly harsh with them. Like that review I read of Tomb Raider in which the reviewer admits to have been harsh with the game mainly because of 'squandered potential'. What did the Prince of Persia princess do? Yeah, I think that's what most feminists, including Sarkeesian, really want, but because we mostly hear them talking about the bad, their views seem limited. That is stupid, but awkwardness at Carth's declaration of love in KOTOR is what has made me avoid making female characters in RPGs ever since.

Not only are youtube comments on the lowest scales of relevancy and interest, but the very way they are set-up makes it hard to hold a conversation or debate. Youtube is not where you go to express your ideas about the video you just watched. Second explanation, obviously. However, he's still the guy who decided to down-grade her from kick-ass protagonist to unmoving object of desire with no agency. That's lazy and unacceptable. I think she, like a lot of other people who reacted badly to the 'strong female characters', wanted 'strong characters, female' rather than 'female characters, strong'. I can't remember from whom is the original quote. That argument has been put forth and then slapped out of the way by so many people, in almost all visual media, why are people still using it? The women are objectified as objects of desire for the male audience, male protagonists are given fantasized attributes of strength and body perfection for the sake of escapism. Male characters are also far more diverse in their builds and appearance than women are. Heu, non. Sarkeesian has played and enjoyed video games, even a few of those she currently criticizes. It is a hobby that she enjoys. The NRA people are nutjobs who want to take the heat off their own hobby by attacking another. I don't think that was her point, really. She seems to want to make an extensive presentation of the Damsel in Distress trope, so she went for the examples which made her point clearer : Mario and Zelda, in which the distressed damsel is robbed of any sort of agency and is reduced to a McGuffin, an object. The Zelda she mentioned adds insult to injury by having Zelda be a strong, competent individual for most of the game and then suddenly lose all of that just so that she can put back in her 'traditional' 'role' as a distressed damsel.

I think it was Sawyer who said once said on his tumblr that Obsidian never got a share from the sales of the games they made, although there sometimes gain a bonus when the game reaches some numbers. Bethesda being painted as a daemonic entity of pure evil and greed for the Metacritic thing always seemed silly to me. They missed it by one point, if memory serves. That's a case of bad luck, not Bethesda having set unreachable goals or Obsidian overestimating the quality of their game.