cronicler

Assasins creed had a very nice first mission. The whole go into town and do some intel gathering jobs etc were fine (Well that could have been presented in a more meaningful way than: "you have to do these for me to allow you to do the hit" but thats a minor point) but somehow the game "ended" at the end of the first solo nission you did. After that they just recycled the same bits of the game again and again for each hit. It was an enjoyable game and it had brilliant free running I don't disagree but I felt "cheated" after having to endure the same thing over and over again. TRhey could have at leastt introduced some other intel side missions as missions progressed. Also the hits themselves were too Holywood. I really missed "Thief" moments when you could get someone alone and whack him silently...

Edited first post for the latest announcement

REally sorry Purkake, I did run searches on both BG&E and the Beyond etc etc but the system didn't bring me any topics. Sory for the extra topic. Hell Kitty: I couldn't find anything insearch so I compiled a rough history and then gave link to the weird announcement from Ubi.

First some announcements: A B C D Then a very weird announcement. Edit:

And I pay for this...

Bleh Lucas (F)Arts seems to be really in bad situation. They laid off all of their devs and now they are corpsef.. re-issuing old games via 3rd parties. I hope a decent studio gets the Space Sims or it will be a sad day.

I was sure LotRO was going to sink at first but it had some serious backing at its worst time. Since then it has been growing back up. This seems to be the pitfall for the MMOs, if you go bust on your release hype, it takes some real backing to survive the first time period. A lot of 3rd gen. MMOs died in that period.

Sure better graphics allow you to loose yourself in and into the game more easyly but is there a real big difference between say Risen and maxed Crysis(tem cry) I'm not talking about System Shock 2 graphics vs UT 3.76 engine.

Haven't looked at end game content for Aion but the level up content does surpass WoW in nearly every way. Time will tell if it's end game is going to be a match for WoW but I am not very poessimistic about it as this game was designed for Korean Market as priority (Koreans are really heavy on league style Player versus Player combats and Mass Player vs Envirolment Raids. )

As an ex-wow maniac, I can say that wow was released at the perfect time (2nd gen. mmos like original everquest were all winding down and a new generation of gamers were on the horizon) and had the extreme luck of having all of its opponents go bust by bugs / bad content and other problems. Early day Wow was not a masterpiece but by creating new and better end game content and definately not sitting on their arses, Blizz managed to keep the game's hype fresh. After that, like Purkake mentioned, The game managed to exceed some financial bottleneck and become a monopoly. (Thanks to every opponent making extremely bad decisions and boring its playerbase to tears. SWG, EQ2, War, AoC and countless others i guess.) Now there are actually a lot of people who are bored with WoW but as some of my RL friends put it bluntly; There is no other game (mmo) to play that won't tank in 6 months or run out of content in 2. Aion, with its lenghty development time and not using too many known, yawned and detested Pr hypes, spread through word of mouth and it managed to create a very nice launch numbers. We will see if it will pull an AoC (age of Conan) on us or if it will be able to sustain its fun... Edit: Games like Eve and SWG (before Sony caught her in a dark alley and did bad things to her) and a few others that I can't remember at the moment are not MMOs in the same category as others. They were 2ng Generation MMOs aimed at its own target audiance (a number enough to cover it's running costs and a bit more for development) . They started with small targets and got bigger cautiously. Eve might have transformed into a newest generation game with its expansions and overhauls but it's costs always came from their own profits.

I must be really really techno-illiterate but I can't understand this hunger for better graphics. Sure the graphics are still somewhat sterile (as we (game engines and cpu powers) can't handle dust and rain and mud acting as real life) but other than that... Do you really need the resolution of basketball court x soccer field?

The (spooky) Wizards (who live at the dead mashes) of Coast will "Sue" your corporal body soo hard

I like magnetical acceleration. You can't build a BMF Plasma cannon and cook a good meal with it but you can make nice steaks with magnetic acceleration.

Nice list. Kudo's for compling it. If you would accept a suggestion, I would recomment looking for some of the more known (or bigger or whatever) indie RPG titles to the list. Studios like Spiderweb Software and TaleWorlds Also I would also advocate Putting in games like System Shock or Deus Ex. Afterall FO3 is considered a true rpg too.

Lucian, we have gone over everything we could think about by ourselves: factions, city politics, cults, mutants and bos and ncr and other "should be" far away factions, Vegas area, Vegas looks in 50's, the area map, fanfic scenario ideas, what we would like to be carried over from other games... Unless we get some bits to chew or speculate about, all we can do is... well whine i guess. Would you be such a grand guy and help us poke the folks at Obsidian? Pretty please?

Morgoth, How many people do you think worked on FO1's cstory and quests and other written bits? Most of the work for FO1 way on making an engine from ground up. We see the size difference when they couldshift most of the creators from coding to creating. They have a decently coded engine, they are creative people with decent past (that is opensource) and they are not restricted by PR or other Policies or diseases of corporation rot. My personal guess is 65 to 35 for an enjoyable and good game at this point. Sure it doesn't look spectacular. So what? I am still playing JA2 and Defense Grid over CnC3+ and other modern crap. When you are not playing an FPS, the graphics falls way down in priority list. Hell I still have Dwarven Fortress here...

During the development process of WtM:B, Source engine was also "still" in development. This (the final changes in Source creating more work and bugs for the game) caused a lot of wasted work-hours for Troika. They were also a lot of issues with Activision (like not beaing allowed to patch the game untill there were a lot of complaints to Activision / rushed release date etc). Then again you are fundamentally correct in a way. RPG titles are not really fast money makers. Their greatest strenght comes from... well not dieing i guess. It's like Interplay earning cash from FO1 and 2 even today or BG/IWD still being sold. You are also correct in Troika's (and previous companie's) bad financial managements.

RPG games for Pcs dont sell.... Wake up and smell the coffee Morgoth. How long has it been since you seen a real RPG game release instead of "X Game with RPG elements" or an RPGlite (ala most Jrpgs or excel tables). Troika went under for their extremely buggy release of Arcanum and being lab-rats for Source engine. The amount of sales you need is in direct ratio to amount you spend for the game. A 2 man team with (20? 50?) part time helpers does not need to sell 200.000 units in retail to make some buck. (Hell they will probably get most of their buck from Digital release as you get royally shafted in box and retail department if you are small fish.) They have a decent engine that shows the needed barebones graphical representation for combat and world. The engine is (or should be) just a tool to tell the story (instead of story being a paper thin mask to show off shinny graphics)

Isn't that called Rocktober this year?

Actually I'm rather happy with the delay. If it was coming out for the New Year shopping spree, it would probably be a rushed product. Better late then Bethesda, I mean buggy.

The animations have a lot of problems. The Stats system is barely working The skills are also in need of adjustment Vats needs a serious overhaul Crafting and weapon degradation needs overhaul Random spawns need to be regulated in a meaningful way That idiot level scaling needs to go and burn in hell The Npcs that are in your group need to be overhauled Inventory system has its borked moments every 7 steps Weapons are prone to go ape The perks are filled with useless and illogicals and cheat codes Overland map needs a decent stylization and be useful the pipboy interface needs to be cleared and steamlined Fast travel needs to be overhauled.... Then related to all of these, there are lots of bugs that make the game act weird. I am not even touching dialogue / story etc as Obsidian are crafting those from ground up. The barely working parts do make a long list...

I wonder if guys at Obsidian founded 2 different teams for this game; 1 making the new game content (story, dialogs, design, voices etc) and other fixing the mess they were given. I do feel sorry/angry for them. They will be the ones fixing Bethesda's sub-par products and B will be using those fixes in their new title....

The problems that we face today (in gaming) associated with DRM are not about the DRM themselves but the mindset behind it. The whole mindset is shortsighted, monopolysing and lying trough its teeth.

Ok: A little reminder on skills: -If your stats are all 5-5-5 range, then your skills will be around 10 to 15. -Tagged skills have a further +10 on them -The game has 25 books and 1 bobblehead for each skill. -If you take the Comprehension Perk and Collect all the stuff, this nets you 60 skill points. So if you are a bit patient, you can get all your skills into 90+ range even with an Int 1 character. (Int 1 gives you 11 skill points per level.) On the other hand, skills don't relly affect anything in the world (other than giving you extra damage...) . Nearly everything (except dialogue checks) has a fixed minimum skill requitrement and if you pass that somehow (mentats, clothing, items etc) then the game doesn't care if you are a moron or genius...

Disclaimer: I am not connected to this project and I don't have much info other than what I have seen over at NMA or the 2238 site. Ill try to drag someone from the team so you can flay... i mean grill him