entrerix

i like realtimewithpause too, but I think that there should still be a few turn based games coming out. there are a billion on the handheld systems, but they lack rpg depth usually.

I think we are on the verge of seeing some very very cool indie/smaller budget games. already there have been a few successes, world of goo, braid, torchlight, shadow complex etc I'm eagerly awaiting an influx of awesome indie rpgs that prove you don't always need shiny to make something awesome. Tim shaefers halloween rpg type game with the kids and the costumes looks very promising, i'm sure some other stuff is gonna be sizzle too. maybe a demons souls 2? that game was great but it also had plenty of room for improvements (i also dont know what the budget was like on that game) i think the next few years are going to really interesting. (not so much the AAA titles, I think those will continue on the path they are now, each one becoming more and more similar to eachother until all AAA games will be a mix between CoD, gta, bioshock, and mass effect.)

gah. they should just release a turn based dragon age and turn based mass effect and label them something other than sequels. metal gear had the Ac!d series, why can't we have nice things for our rpg franchises i wouldnt care if the graphics were poo even. infinity engine or better would be good enough for me.

i would love a turn based mass effect

why not play it in offline mode? then it doesnt matter whats going on with your internet connection.... i never play steam in online mode (unless I'm playing an online game).

yeah that ign article was an absolute joke.

ok so I'm working through the longest journey... it's a pretty slow moving game... the only adventure game I'd play before this was the monkey island remake with the hints and the fancy new graphics (though the old graphics are awesome and I switched back and forth between the shiny and the vintage as I played)... maybe its the humor, or maybe its the hint system, but so far the monkey island game was WAY more entertaining than the longest journey has been so far. I'm only halfway through chapter 2, but so far I haven't really DONE anything, it feels like I'm performing some pretty bizarre tasks to accomplish some minimal goals (the effort required to get a little key for a fuse box so that I can then turn off a light on a movie theater to make a janitor go away... seriously... I couldnt just pay the guy ten bucks to open the door?) I dunno, I'm thinking that the game just isnt for me. There is a story somewhere in there right? the game started with an old lady beginning a tale... of someone corrupting a piece of candy to give to a crooked cop to make him sick so he would stop standing near a light post.... eh, am I missing something here? Cause I'm trying to enjoy the game but the game keeps getting in the way...

dog was fun

y'know... I've been thinking about dragon age a bit. The combat sucked pretty hard in that game. It might not have been noticeable had there been a 60% reduction in the amount of fights you have to engage in, but as it stood, with that many millions of mooks to slay, the combat became a chore by mid-game. I didnt feel that way the first time I played, but I recently tried replaying the game, made it past lothering, and then started remembering how many more of the same 2 darkspawn types I had to kill (seriously, wtf was up with the lack of enemy types in that game...) and gave up. the combat in mass effect 2 was not a chore for me, it wasnt great, but I never got pissed off at all the fighting. so if they have to scrap the combat from dragon age to avoid having a horribly repetitious experience again (presumably because they don't know how to make a game that doesnt have 1billion fights in it), then so be it. The best parts of dragon age were the character interactions (ie your dog pestering everyone) and the moments where you felt like your decisions mattered. the worst parts were all the fights. There were a few cool fights, like the incredibly frustrating fight against ser cauthrien (who could have singlehandedly ended the blight...), but mostly they were just annoyances. So yeah, I guess I'm now on board for the overhaul to the combat system even though i was against it before. edit: I wonder also, how much better could a crpg be if the encounter system was modeled more after shadow of colossus (ie, there are only boss fights)? Imagine dragon age with only 15-25 fights in the whole game, but each one is an epic and mind wracking battle where you are forced to use lots of tactics and strategies and adapt your attack several times in the fight to adjust to new paramaters? (ie crumbling landscapes, reinforcements etc etc) could be cool. could be a lot cooler than 1 million tunnel fights.

i agree, many of the shots, particularly those with crates in them, evoke memories of deus ex. I think they did a more than passable job at maintaining enough of the "look" of deus ex but with all the modern bells and whistles. except the yellow/black tint things going on, deus ex didnt have that but i understand the marketing value of establishing a sort of "color identity" when releasing a major game...

the newest ign preview said that they had framerate issues and AI issues. I'm going to assume they were playing on an xbox instead of a high end pc with regard to the framerate issues, and that the AI issues are the same ones we had in fallout 3? I personally dont care, but I worry that people are going to be overly critical of bugs in New Vegas because of the reputation obsidian has earned with some gamers after neverwinter nights 2 and alpha protocol... to josh: how much of the next 2 months is bugfixes and optimization?

ok well that answered that question lol. one more game out of gamebryo then... I have to admit I'm a bit surprised since the engine has been showing its age in my eyes, or maybe thats just the animation again...

this maybe confirms some peoples earlier suspicions that the next fallout and elder scrolls games will be using the id tech. I think thats a good thing if it leads to better animations than gamebryo seemed able to allow? unless gamebryo wasnt the problem and it was just bethsoft not knowing how to animate... im not a tech guy so i just dont know this stuff

gameplay looks pretty good to me. It doesnt look like deus ex gameplay, but thats ok with me because that gameplay is old and could use an update. HOWEVER, the open-ended nature of the game must not be ignored for this to be a good sequel. I forget, did they keep a limited inventory? thats kinda important (this is one area that bioshock totally botched, system shock 2's inventory system was 100000x better than bioshocks Doom-style "I can carry every weapon" inventory.)

hmm, still would be nice to be able to say the line (about suspecting the guy even without inspecting the bodies) to orris and have orris respond "well did you check the bodies to see for sure??" then the player can feel dumb for not checking... which is better than the player thinking the game made a boo boo would that be hard to add? i have no idea how much work it takes to add lines of dialogue to a game like this...

I started the longest journey last night, got through prologue and chapter 1. am intrigued, liked conversation about art with cortez... conversation about what is art while playing a video game seemingly about art. yet a debate exists about whether games can BE art. amused! puzzles are good so far, not too tough, i suck at hard puzzles, especially non-sequitor ones... monkey island is the only other one I played and there were some puzzles that i would never have figured out without the hint system.

His team certainly is. Irrational is owned by 2K. They could walk out en masse and create a studio from scratch (it's been done, certainly) but that would likely invite a lot of legal trouble, and no small amount of closed doors from publishers concerned about the "temperament" of the people they contract. It's just a bit ironic that you show such disdain for big-ticket games and deign to characterize James Cameron as an artiste in the world of film. I certainly didnt intend to say cameron was an artiste of the likes of kurosawa or orson welles or anything. But he did make two of the greatest action films ever made by anyone ever in history ever (terminator and aliens), so don't talk about him like he's paul ws anderson. my point was that cameron's movies make so much money that he can probably do whatever he wants. also: if you can find one post i've made where I show general disdain for big ticket games I will give you a cookie. I love big-ticket games. I don't like halo or gears of war, but I love call of duty, zelda, final fantasy (but not 13) etc etc. I mostly play big ticket games.

...and still making Halo games zing! edit: but that actually kinda is what im getting at too, I think Levine COULD have made pretty much whatever he wanted, and he went the safe but boring route (ie halo reach/ bioshock infinite). I would have preferred something a little more different (but not too different, i would not have been interested in a racing game for example) edit 2: but also bungie is working a new IP, and thats what I was hoping Levine was working on too (actually i really just wanted system shock 3 so my cries for "originality" are pretty hypocritical)

Christopher Nolan is not owned by investors. He can walk away and make movies for different people if he wants to. This is not how game development works. Levine is not literally owned by investors unless he has a contract for a certain amount of games or something like that. I'm sure if he said "Hi EA, I plan on making this unique and original game, my last unique and original game was bioshock. If you're interested in publishing this, gimme a call" they would probably give him a call... look what happened with the guys from infinity ward, something tells me they will have the opportunity to make whatever they feel like (though I imagine they just want to make more military fps games) or bungie finally getting freedom to make their own games... I see a future where good developers (ie the speilbergs and camerons of the game world) can make their own games and have publishers fight over who gets to release it. Maybe I see that because its pretty much what happened with hollywood at the end of the studio era.

i don't every see myself buying a game for my phone. Maybe if I had a job which required a lot of travel or something but still i'd rather just use a laptop or DS.

good lord thats a stupid idea....

new vegas is at quakecon... wonder if we'll learn anything new about the game. pretty crazy that its coming out in two months... i keep expecting it to get pushed back till january or march though...

whats strange is that a lot of people are upset at dragon age 2 being too different than one, and a lot of people are now upset that bioshock 3 is not different enough from 1 and 2. i think its because most of us were under the impression that dragon age was going to remain a more traditional crpg franchise, and that irrational was making something totally different than bioshock. its all about setting expectations...

i dunno, christopher nolan has been rather successful lately and batman begins, the prestige, dark knight, and inception are all pretty darn different, and two of those are batman movies and they still manage to feel very different from eachother. I think its a shame that they could have done anything they wanted with the capital they earned from knocking bioshock out of the park, and they chose to make something so similar looking to their last project.

I loved the first, liked the second (for 20$, would have disliked it for 60$), and am not very interested in a third. Its frankly a lot less interesting when revisited multiple times. If system shock 3 had come out 1 year after system shock 2 and had been almost identical I probably wouldnt have been that excited then either. which is why this should have been futureshock/systemshock3/cybershock whatever... some sort of awesome scary sci-fi game. and not a prequel to bioshock. arg. I'll still end up getting it once it goes on sale for 20$, or if there actually is a lot more to the game than whats been said so far. but right now it just looks like more of the same.......