Monte Carlo

Two new, free, commanders dropped into CoH2 yesterday. The game is F2P on Steam this weekend, by the way. Here's the lend-lease Sherman for the Soviets...

Wow how can a lawyer fail to understand the difference between strategy and tactics? The decision to make / buy potions in the first place, and their suite of effects, might be strategic. As might be the choice of skill 'a' to create a more effective synergy with potion 'b'. The decision to take them will be tactical.

No, Inquisitions are perfect for social justice warriors like Bio. The 'liberal' soft-left are morphing into McCarthyites, look at what happened at Mozilla. It's their way or the Highway.

The fact that people want Romance in RPG is no more obsessive than people who want multi-levelled dungeons, interesting armour, varied questing, realistic monster ecosystems and dozens of other things I could name that define the RPG experience for a person. Remember Monte that we never should presume to tell others what is acceptable content around there RPG experience, its very subjective Everything is subjective. Which is why saying it's subjective is, essentially pointless. I find Bioware's status as romance-purveyors of choice in their games unacceptable. There, I said it. I also strongly believe many of the wiser heads at that studio know full well the cul-de-sac that decision has trapped them in. Bioware has been hoisted on its own petard, imagine if one of their designers wanted to make a totally romance-free product? They couldn't. They are trapped. Bwahahahahahah.

I read an interview where the producer was at pains to explain that he's new to Bioware and had nothing to do with DA2. It's like being the mayor of a small German town in 1946. You had nothing to do with What Went Before.

Not necessarily but possibly. It's certainly obsessive. Tell me about your childhood.

I hope someone mods the original GUI back in. How that one is 'enhanced' is a genuine mystery to me.

The real issue, sadly, is Bruce's obsessive / compulsive tendencies concerning this subject. The entire BSN is the same, a fetid hothouse of cognitive dissonance for the sexually frustrated.

Welcome back. What a breath of fresh air, considering what a holy cow this game is. And it's too expensive. One for the heresy thread, perhaps, but I for one am inclined to agree.

^ The only 'connection' I need to play with make-believe characters nowadays is an internet connection.

more important: they better all be romanceable, or there will be hell to pay. HA! Good Fun! If the cow man, or the the woman on the left is romanceable, how do we classify that. Or are those helmets It's a Bioware game. That table is probably romanceable.

They are all about to throw their car keys in the bowl to the right, just to get things started.

Please Bruce, you have to do it. I too want to see the adventures of a politically-correct Kommissar love-machine, defeating evil in Ferelden via an unlikely combination of authoritarian terror and lurve.

Yeah, this is the new s***

Apparently so, an interesting counterfactual. You only need to buy one of the new factions to get into multiplayer, so I see a massive spike in new blood in CoH2.

Indira and Calax (and anybody else) let me know when you are up for some MP against the 'puter and I'll put a gonzo 4 v 4 together. Check out some of the Steam workshop maps too, mebbe we can all download one of the massive, crazier ones.

We need to do what we did with Australia - get a load of convicts and peasants, put them in a ship and fire them at this rock. The result is a race of hardy athletes who are resistant to hostile environments and spiders. Perfect,

I fired a .45 once, wow it kicked like a mule. I was also lucky enough to fire a Thompson with a fifty-round drum magazine, again a .45. It makes this awesome chugging noise.

My stock answer, Sheikh, is difficulty sliders, options and game modes. There's nothing inherently wrong with content tourism. It's a single-player experience. There's nothing inherently wrong with hardcore, perma-death endurance gaming. It's a single-player experience. Sawyer has shown with games like NV that he understands this and from Icewind Dale onwards BIS / Obz games have had a wide range of difficulty and customization options. I, personally, am looking forward to tinkering with these to give me my preferred option, which is hardcore-but-not-torturous (hardcore lite? Mid-core? who cares?). Mechanics are a different issue, and one which I doubt I'll personally agree with Sawyer on, but I will reserve judgement.

Best theme music EVAR... Justin please check it out. http://youtu.be/8XKGhG0W0LQ Plus stirring Soviet army vocals ftw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEt41bYQBgE

Reminds me a bit of IWD2, which is a Good Thing.

Gary wrote Unearthed Arcana, which saw the introduction of the Barbarian. Look, the lame preponderance of classes, kits and all the rest of it was (and always has been) about selling splat-books. One of the things I do agree with Sawyer about is that base classes should add efficacy in and of themselves without the need for prestige classes, kits, sub-classes or whatever other name we might call them.

It's semantics really, I agree. Sub-class sounds better than kit. Barbarians and Monks were, in 2E nomenclature, classes. Barbarians were ostensibly quasi-fighters despite their D12 hit dice and Monks quasi thieves with their D6 hit dice. Again, though, it's an exercise in typically Gygaxian* syntax and an example of how higgledy-piggledy the development of the AD&D ruleset was. * Although of course I loved Gary and all his works, quirks, hubris an' all.

^ Easily. I think most people here who've ever played old-skool CRPGs have either run, designed or adventured in a mega-dungeon. The only limit is your imagination and your game engine. I used to theme mine, for example I had a Mad Lich who enjoyed gladiatorial combat and built the dungeon to amuse himself. He also liked experimenting on his prisoners to make the Ultimate Warrior. So levels 1-5 were the slave pits, laboratories, barracks, arena (including an aquatic one for his pet Kraken), dojo, armouries and stuff. Levels 6-10 were all about the former life the lich enjoyed prior to his ascension, including a crypt for his bride (now a long-undead entity herself), catacombs, tombs, libraries, a temple to the insanely evil deity he worshipped and so on. This level accidentally caved in and exposed a network of caverns populated by a druidical lizardman tribe who often fought with the undead and who could befriend / trade with adventurers. Being neutrally-aligned, they were especially welcoming to good-aligned clerics, paladins and other smiters of the undead. Levels 10 + (like all good mega-dungeons it was never truly finished) was the personal domain of the lich - his personal chambers, demonic harem of succubi, bodyguard's rooms, a great hall for entertaining (with a troupe of undead bards) and of course the lich's personal magicarium, summoning chambers and phylactery. The levels were all sorts of shapes and sizes, the level with the crypt and lizard man caves being the largest. As for scale, well the tabletop game is going to be different to a CRPG but it was pretty straightforward - don't think about hitting level 4 until you are level 4 (big party) to 6 (smaller party) and so on. I'm going to look for the wandering monster table in the loft. It was all typed.

That'll be the 4th Ed that was the shortest lived iteration of the game, right? The one that turned droves of gamers to Pathfinder, or to sit out D&D until a better version popped out of WotC? Jesus wept.