lasthearth

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/6/22/

Making what consumers want is how a industry survives. A industry that doesn't will soon cease to be an industry.

Yes, naturally. Making 9000 clones of the same game is helping the gerne and market evolve. Deriviating from that is "running the business". Well, we'll see, I predict this game will bomb, and ultimately that's the proof that they don't know how to run a gaming company.

So they set out to make an loot centric ARPG that is targeted at people who didn't like Diablo? Okay, then they are terrible at this thing called running a business.

It's stupid because their system can be duplicated by a group that wishes to play that way and enjoy their games that way. If you and 3 of your friends decided that you will play the campaign together, and that each of you will only use the same characters in that game whom you will not use in any other game but only when you play together, then all of you can duplicate the experience of the single player keeps the save game for everyone game without Obsidian making their save system that way. In other words, having a save system limited in this way only limits the number of ways this game can be enjoyed, which reduces the number of people interested, reduces the potential sales of this game, and hurts Obsidian and Square-Enix's bottomline. My issue isn't that I can only enjoy the game one way, my issue is that they could have made the game enjoyable for your style and my style, but instead chose to only make it enjoyable for you. Which means I will not be buying it (except when it's really cheap), and that's a dumb business decision.

Being different does not make it bad per se, but in this case it does because there is a good sound reason why nobody else decided to go this way. Because it was a bad idea. All the reasons people have for wanting to play a loot centric action RPG has been taken away, because you don't get to keep your loot, or your levels. This game is going to bomb and it will deserve it.

Then they should have made this a single player game and forget the whole "co-op" thing. Because it seems that's the game they really wanted to make. Bottom line, there is no game in this generation that works this way. None. Even games that were designed to be co-op do not work this way. Resident Evil 5 was designed to be a story centric co-op game, but each player gets to and keep their own levels and weapons. Demon's Forge is about to come out and that is a co-op game, and I'll bet it won't work this way, it will allow both players to save their own progress. Halo allowed both players to save their own progress, and if they made a Dark Alliance game today it would allow individuals to save their progress. There is no way to get around how poor a decision this is.

How often does your friends lose HDs, also easily avoided by doing back-up save (on PC atleast) in case you are really that worried... Do they live in a rural area where Internet is down all the time? The game can be finished in 15 to 25 hours according to reviews, doesn't take a huge commitment if you ask me. Unless you play with some really casual players. But then again why would you choose someone like that as the host if you know how the multiplayer works. Maybe Nathan or someone could tell if it's possible for the host to send the save file to someone else in case the host decides to quit playing. You're missing the point, which is that for whatever reason the hosts stops playing, I only mentioned some possibilities but there could be many more, maybe he just went on vacation for a few weeks, maybe he has a busy project at work and won't be able to play for a few weeks, whatever the reason, everyone who was the part of that game who may have put 15-20 hours into the game are held hostage and have to start over. This is a terrible system. There is no justifiable defense for it, and with a little bit of effort and creativity they could have avoided such a flawed system, they were either too stubborn or too lazy to do it, and neither speaks well of them.

Not necessarily - if you play on without your friend, then he/she comes back, they will be able to 'jump back' into their character, which will be auto-levelled to match your character. They just need to take a couple of minutes to distribute their newly gained points. While this means they miss out on a part of the game, that would have happened anyway in any system - it just means you don't have to waste time helping them level up and they doesn't have to give up playing with you because you're too far ahead. But you can't play on if he's the host and all the progress is saved on his console. I can have a group of 4 dedicated players, and the host either loses interest in the game or maybe or HD crashes, or his internet is out. Now none of us can continue the game. This is seriously retarded, and the sad thing is they could have gotten around this problem if they just gave it a little more effort. But it seems Obsidian is more about stubbornly making their game rather than a game for players to enjoy. This game has gone from day one purchase to maybe I'll pick up from the bargain bin, which I have no doubt it will end up in fairly quickly.

Does this game at least have New Game+, where once you finish a game you can load that character into a higher difficulty level?

Save game may be correct but not the rest as I understand it. Using your example. If I host I get first choice, and choose Reinhart, which leaves 3 from MY pool for you. You choose Cat which leaves two others available from my pool if anyone else wants to play. When I save and quit, our inventory, including whatever your Cat has, gets saved to my system. If, when I continue, you don't come back you just wasted 8 hours of monster killing time, albeit hopefully had fun wasting it. If you decide to play Cat in someone else's game you have to make sure she's available in their pool. Once in you're established as per the point in the game they are. If they've half completed it with Lucas, Cat will be half levelled up, though her equipment may still be level 0 unless the host of that game has given her equipment. In short the only player to own a pool of inventory, gold, etc is the player hosting. As host I'm graciously allowing you to play in my sandbox. When it's time to leave you have to leave your toys behind! I think that was the suspicion early on but they have since said that in multiplayer games all players get to keep their experience and loot.

My guess is that your savegame is not just that of one character, but all four characters, so when you play online coop, each player is picking the character from their pool of four, but just have to make sure that they are picking different ones. You're picking Lucas from your pool of four and I'm picking Catarina from my pool of 4. And everything I pick up gets added to my pool of inventory and gold and everything you pick up gets added to yours

If the "story-telling" gets in the way of fun gameplay, then really you should adjust the storytelling to accommodate the game playing. Lootwhore games are not about the story. Diablo had almost no story, people still loved it.

I agree with Clockwerk completely on this, if they don't have multiplayer Sacred 2/Diablo 2 style, then this game will at best be a bargain bin pick up for me. The only reason I was looking forward to this game and planning to get it day 1 is so that I can play it local co-op with friends, but I don't think any of my friends are interested in playing as my side-kick where all the gains and kept to my gamertag and my save file and they get to keep nothing when they walk away. I was planning on pre-ordering this today but now that I see this I am going to hold off until further announcements.

disagree, the witcher was epic! I found the combat in the Witcher to be very mediocre.

How about this, "realtime combat in RPGs are usually subpar".

Wow, Avellone actually said this about comparing AP to ME: "Sure, I think they

So the latest tweet says "I raised the subject of salary and Operation budgets. The response? "You're a field agent, you're under Alpha Protocol." The fact "salary" is used is not good. Sega delayed the game but isn't going to pay Obsidian any more money?

Doctor: I'm sorry, the news is not good, you have only one year to live. Me: Why, what's wrong with me? You: YOU'RE GONNA DIE IN A YEAR! DOES IT REALLY MATTER WHY? Me: Yes.

You don't think it's possible that part of the plot of the game involve Islamic terrorists? Or attempts by US insiders to fake an attack on the US and blame it on Islamic terrorist, or possible capture and abduction of terrorists that are kept in super secret detention centers subjected to torture for information extraction? I'm not saying any of this is in the game, but I can envision any and all of them being in there and I can envision some group out there having a fit over them.

Yes, but sometimes it doesn't occur to a company that certain content is controversial until somebody brings it up. Remember Resident Evil and the whole racism charge. And 6 days in Fallujah's content was well known for sometime before cancellation. Maybe the issue was only brought up recently and somebody at Sega went, "oh crap it never occurred to us, we gotta take that out."

Given how far this game is along, and all the talks about how close it's to release, how all the advertising was running in the magazines, the 8 month delay makes no sense. What if the delay is content related? That Sega is finding part of the plot too "real world", and potentially too controversial politically. Remember 6 days in Fallujah getting canceled? What if Sega is asking Obsidian to basically completely rework part of the plot to avoid the potential controversy, and the silence is because they don't even want to hint at what the original controversial content is. So we're dealing with a re-write of the major parts of the game?

Insisto is Latin. It could be something like "none may enter?" or something similar?

Where are you getting this from?

The title of this thread should be changed to "So, when is the game delayed til?" Gamefly is not even listing a June 2010 release date, they just list it as TBD.