cronicler

C2B: I don't have a problem with cellar being built into a cave. I just wish there were some (more) indicators for it, like a "brick walls -> rough stone walls -> stone cave" kind of transition before the said part. And mate, I have been around a burning building, there is no bloody way I would go that deep into a burning building. Ever. That said it is not the looking for survivors that bothers me. "The building is on fire" aspect just seems ham handed to me. If it had been something like: You enter the ruined building, you link up with the bloke then during the next fights sequence a fire breaks out and the bloke says "No, they are waiting for us outside, lets go trough the cellars!", it would have been mighty fine. As it stands now, it feels irritating to me. The camera; yea I did jump in the game with just a cursory look at the keyboard layout. Didn't check the options deeply.

I just downloaded and tried the demo. And to be honest, my first impressions are not good. Now the story and the writing is nice but the voice-over and the map logic (not design) are absolutely rubbish. I mean, come on, you arrive at a rural estate and the place is under attack. And you don't see any bad guys around the Estate trying to stop people running away or going in. And then you enter the burning building. errr what?. You face a couple of waves of enemies inside a burning building in the cellars. You meet a survivor and guess what? you calmly chat with the bloke. I don't think anyone could have provided such a jarring voice-over. There is no excitement, no panic, just stoic nonsense... Map logic is also a poor point. At the end of Estate, you light the fuse to some gunpowder barrels to blow a bridge in the cellars. In the cellars... I mean would it be too much to transition into a cave system from the cellars then have the bridge in the caves or something? Not to mention entering a burning building in the first place... I only played the Warrior so far and I want to ask Obsidian; whose idea was it to omit strafe and back-pedalling? You can run forward, roll forward and backwards and that's it. The whole sword-play is just a chaos especially when your guy starts to auto-face to nearest target and your camera starts to swing with him. What bothers me most is the feeling of wasted potential. The game looks and plays nice, the effects are solid. The writing is good. The story is unimaginative but usable. The whole things feels like a broken bike with loose bolts. If the controls were a bit more precise, if the voice actors were acting a bit, If the maps were a bit more logical... It could have been such a better game.

J.E. Sawyer: I want to ask you a question from the other side of the AI spectrum; we all know that AI is going to be wonky and problematic no matter how much you work on it, so why not go for the other way? Why not give the player more control on the companions? From most recent to oldest ME, Brothers in Arms, HL2 and Freedom Fighters have shown us that even the dumbest off the shelf aimbot can add to the players experience with just 4 commands (Attack and Hold, Hold, Come to Me, Fall Back to safe place) I know there would be issues (doorways and melee ambushes / characters come to mind) but wouldn't giving more control to the player make it better? On a similar vein, on your next game, I hope you give the player more options to customise his/her game. It would have been nice to have an advanced mode where you could tinker with the settings for the game independently (enemy damage, hp, awareness; player dam, hp, sneakiness, awareness; difficulty sliders for combat, non-combat, tech, thief; deadly headshots, killable (or not) quest npcs and so on) I know you can use the mod tools to do all of these but it would have been nice to have a straight in game or (JA2 1.13 like) external config to simply tweak the game...

MC: Compared to specialised urban police vehicles, older generation APCs are actually quite cheaper to obtain and maintain thanks to surplus prices and interchangeability of spares with military gear. The funny thing is, you can't actually buy such vehicles with liquid throwers as default weapon. Liquid throwers are listed/thought as "easy to convert to flame throwers" and for "humane" reasons, it is harder to buy them. You need to buy your own pressure assembly separately and field modify it for water cannon if you want to have one. (Hell, it is even a bureaucratic nightmare to buy armoured fire-fighting vehicles for airports...)

I know it is an oxymoron but on paper, a megacity seems easier to run on electricity alone as elevators and extremely robust grid makes it possible to use dinky electrical engines without the limitations of capacitors. Its just that... it would become a rat warren in a generation at most. underhive and all...

Just a short 5-6 minute massage, the kind that feels like kneading dough, applied to shoulders, back of the neck and upper back is usually enough to relax and de-stress people. you should get your hubby to help you a bit. Edit: on a naughty note, if you know what you are doing, a light massage has a 50-50 chance for getting laid . or having your target falling asleep

If you have anyone with a good hand and knowledge for it, get a massage. neck / upper shoulder pains are really hard to shake off with just resting.

Orogun01: the topic has gone for the ground pounders and other specialities of grunts (more or less) as it is the hardest branch for women. I don't think anyone would argue that females can't manage it in (any) airforce or navy. (Well except for subs I guess... and that's more of a "can't mix genders" than what we are discussing here.)

Venetica

The most of the psi powers were either outright useless or barely cost effective compared to the alternatives. However the 5th tier powers are all game breakers. You can finish most of the game with just hack+wrench+tier 1 psi attack. Ironically this also gives you a lot of space for inventory too :D

On female soldiers in infantry positions; personally I don't have much knowledge in the issue however There are a couple of right wing mil / mil-sf writers that I enjoy reading. Tom Kratman is one of them. He recently wrote a novel about females in army, granted his "army" is a far cry from the current day militaries but it does a realistic job on the whys: inferiority of females vs males in infantry positions. (You can find the first 6 chapters here ) To put his observations into bullet points, a female infantry has the following problems compared to a male infantry: -Less carry capacity (it takes about 3 females to carry the load of 2 soldier teams like m.gun, At, Radio, etc.) -Less endurance (Can't march as far) -Less strategical speed (Marches slower) -Needs specialised and dedicated support (Dedicated Childcare to begin with) -Needs more R&R per year (Again childcare, also some other internal problems males don't have) -Has a lot of negative social conditioning that slows training -Totally different starting mindset and priorities that require different training -Needs specialised gear. Even if you give them the same basic gear (gun, armor, fatigues) for most slots to avoid supply issues, you still need different, specialised gear for certain "slots": boots, backpacks, cleaning supplies... -Their effects on males when wounded. You can say that male soldiers do not like to see female units get wiped out. I know that there have been a lot of thinking on how female soldiers would make excellent fixed position soldiers (which does eliminate most of their problems) but most militaries can't really accept the loss of mobility (and the option to use in other unsuited jobs; see how to mis-use rangers and paratroopers: ww2, vietnam...) and overspecialisation. There is no shortage of male cannon fodder after all.

Not Science Fiction at all but I hated when Veronica Mars was cancelled. Then again the execs did manage to butcher the 3rd seasion pretty badly so no wonder...

I've been fiddling with the game mechanics a lot and I found a few nice tidbits that provide some nice gameplay changes; -You can assign multiple skills to any item but normally only 1 governs an attribute (decay rate, damage, spread etc). However you can force 2 skills to the same pool by adding a little bit of chooser code to the beginning. Example: Use Meele or Survial (whichever is higher) for combat knife. Use rifles or Close combat for certain shotguns (my modpile in progress) -adding a couple of new explosives to the crafting list (pipe bomb(fuse), satchel charge (fuse,remote, prox), claymore (remote,prox), Molotov coctail) makes the explosives skill a viable choice for front line combat.

Social stigmata is the only effective way to control substances. It is actually similar to the segregration or gay or smoking issue. The unless the public is ready to accept or reject it, artificial controls just have the opposite effect. Sure maybe there will be more suffering in the short term but once the recreational drugs are in the open, it will loose it's mystique and most of it's appeal. *I do however agree that the line should be drawn at the syntethics. Designer drugs are made to frack you up, no disputing on that. Hate to sound darwinian but soft living lets the rot set in. If you choose to throw your life away (gambling, drinking, drugs or any other recreational thing taken too far) then you should suffer the consequences. Another aspect of drugs is their role in financing the unlawful groups (terrorists, organised crime, rogue nations) by the artificially inflated prices on these weeds. (and most of them are weeds. they are bloody hard to destroy)Probably about 1/3 of the crime in the world stems from them. Wouldn't some direct hands on control be better than leaving it to "naked capitalist scum" ?

How could you like a game that features a Planet (on the run from creditors) as a companion??!? Ps: I'ts ultimate weapon is found on itself?!