Nepenthe

Pretty sure Hitman 2 allowed for a very run and gun play style if you so chose (and took the score penalties). It's only from there that it has emphasised stealth as the _sole_ way of doing things. A welcome return, IMO.

I'd forgotten about that, haven't bought anything from there since DA2 DLC. It does suck. Dude, try to at least approach DA2 with an open mind, there's a surprising amount of RPG veterans who've found in enjoyable in spite of its faults, they just don't come here (any longer)

Certainly not necessary to buy it, and from their information not necessary to download it, either.

What a no-lifer. Arguing with imaginary people over the virtual status of a virtual product that no one is going to remember in a few years. Reeling from the irony, here.

Although rumour has it that Zaeed makes a bigger appearance in the upcoming "Omega" dlc... Also, I have to admit I liked the change of pace of Kasumi's mission (at least , the first section which wasn't run n gun). Really? I haven't been following. Bigger chance of being surprised when something does get released, I guess...

All of the above are true -- however: There is a 100% offline mode, and the Beamdog client doesn't have to be running when you run the game (and there is no advantage of having it running, either -- no "Stream overlay", for example), and you don't have to use cloud saves. There hasn't been an explicit promise that there will not be day-0 DLC, but I'd be shocked if this was the case -- the devs have their hands full simply trying to get the product out the door. Tablets will have day-0 DLC, but that content is included in the PC version, and this was done to reduce the base price on tablets. Mmmh. The beamdog client is the bigger issue for me. I hope that it will come to gog sooner or later. Eh, haven't they repeatedly stated that the game is independent of the Beamdog client, you must simply buy it from there? I mean, I've read it at least 7 times just from Trent Oster's twitter feed, but I see at least two of you claiming otherwise... My impression of that is that they're not exactly sure. OTOH they've mentioned getting David Warner and Jim Cummings back if they add more content for Jon/Minsc, so my take on it is that entirely new content, ie. a Minsc specific quest, would be possible, but, say, adding a new step into Nalia's wouldn't be.

Kasumi... that's an NPC, right? I might just grab that one too. No idea if it's anything like Shale or Jervik in scope, but how bad can it be (famous last words)? Edit: For the other two, I'll look up some more information on them. Like Majek, I'm also a big fan of the Locust SMG you get from her mission, and overall I think she integrates better than Zaeed. Into ME3, too.

I like Kasumi, and I don't exactly regret buying Overlord and Arrival, either, even if they're not of the high quality of the other two. Which begs the question, why were you cutting it that close, anyway?

No (noticeable) effect (which is a travesty), but it changes a bit more than 3 seconds with the extended cut. I think it's around 6 seconds, now...

Story + character inspired emotional decision making? Either that, or the term RPG has become something that's rather loosely defined in the past years. The term RPG has become as inane as the word "epic" in this era. If any game design mechanics or statistics are visible to the player it's immediately branded a (genre)-RPG, regardless of the legitimacy of the RPG suffix. There's a reasonable chance that either Mass Effect 3 or Borderlands 2 will be declared "RPG of the year" for 2012. While we all know that to be accepted as an rpg, the game must feature simulated dice-rolling. Amiright?

The other rumoured SP pack back in the day was Collectors (in fact, it might have been collectors in concert with the Omega DLC, so it might be just the one), so it would kind of make sense for them to reuse the assets. Certainly if they've dragged out Harbies' voice actor it could be a sign that he's coming back for a little more direct contro... Nobody else was disappointed he didn't assume anything in the trailer? Lost opportunity!

Yes, I saved a game before that mission. Thanks for the heads up though. If you've completed the game, the final save also takes place there (kind of like in DAO), so that's generally taken care of. Just that anything saved after that might not worky. Haven't tried, not like I had a bunch of characters at that stage.

Yeah, I just wanted to see the ending that made everyone so mad, and then I'll reload a save and apply the extended cut patch to see the difference. I just wasn't willing to spend days in multiplayer to build up the EMS because that's one hideous design choice. Remember that according to the patch notes, you need to start from the second to last mission for the extended cut to work properly. .

Got my doctoral dissertation from the publisher. Feeling unreal holding the first physical copy in my hand.

I _THINK_ the required EMS was adjusted when the extended cut came out, but I haven't had to test it so I don't know for sure. I'm sure google is your friend in this. Or would've been, as you seem to have happily overcome the idiotic restriction.

Sure, money doesn't just disappear, it goes somewhere. In this case a large chunk of it has gone to Germany. You have to remember I'm looking at this from the Finnish viewpoint. We're tiny, we didn't **** up or profit from the southern waste in the way the Germans did, yet we're paying through the nose for their casino years. I swear the difference between the austerity measures we are "voluntarily" implementing to foot the bill and what the crisis countries are refusing to do is... marginal.

Tom Hall could ride my deus ex nostalgia buck for the year, but seriously bad timing on their part (at the same time with eternity, coming out of nowhere? Meh!)

I hear that fight's been toned down quite a bit from launch (and let's not forget that there's a puzzle that gives you lvl 50 gear for t7, so even if you haven't been keeping him up to date, you're not completely hosed), I'd read some of the earlier warnings (guys, keep t7 _well_ geared for endgame!) and went totally overkill, in my prep for it. I hear it can still give guardians problems, but my sent absolutely facerolled through the encounter because I went so overboard with it. I'd say that the Imperial Agent chapter 1 final encounter takes the cake so far as the absolutely terrifyingly hardest encounter I've yet endured in the game. It's taxed my understanding of the class, luck and player skill to a higher degree than anything I've seen, except maybe for the first boss in Lost Island as a melee dps.

Well, on the european level the Union is doing plenty to target the "filthy rich financial capital", mostly by creating a massive bureaucracy of reporting, requirements and other oddball stuff that mostly remind me of Roman law (I'm half expecting to see a Regulation the specifies the proper way sacrificing sheep to the Brussels Gods). The problem is, of course, that when you run out of money, you have to either cut back or tax more. Sure, in a lot of places there's an established moneyed class that's untouchable due to cronyism, but "taxing the rich" is one of those left-populist war cries that always gets a lot more complicated when you try to implement it in practice. Unless you're honest enough to define rich as "everybody who makes more than I do", you soon run into the problem that there's actually a lot less rich people than you believe. The really rich people often have the option of simply packing up and leaving, meaning that you're in fact just more out of pocket than you were before. So you wind up squeezing the money out of the upper middle class, like you always have. This, in fact, is an interesting facet of the Greek crisis. Since they had basically no (upper) middle class outside of government workers(!) Now those civil servants, archaeologists etc. have been sacked, and they suddenly find themselves without the upper middle class to carry the whole shebang. But again, there are some, but very few, rich people in Greece, and while it's popular to blame them, tax evasion and corruption reaches absolutely all levels of the society. I remember when the taxi drivers were on strike for weeks when a law was passed requiring them to give receipts a while before the 2004 olympics.

While I agree with you that the IMF austerity measures don't exactly promote growth, let's not forget that, say, Greece was a country that simply lived over its means for almost a decade. They had annual pay hikes in the 5-6 % region, so even the "common man" most definitely got a chunk of the pie. And don't get me started on their retirement age. The situation in Europe is different. In the US, you are in control of your own economic and monetary policy, you just have to find someone who knows what he's doing. In Europe it's a bit more complicated - for years now states have been relinquishing their economic -and political- sovereignty to an opaque and undemocratic bureaucracy that answers to no one and whose overall aims and the interests they obey are difficult to discern. This bureaucracy is hellbent on implanting a policy of austerity and cuts that not only is not helping, it's making things worse. Saddled with ever-increasing debt interests, deprived of the economic and political tools to do something about it at the national level (all power to the Troika!), and forced to adopt failed policies that stifle recovery, the outlook is quite bleak. And this isn't just me being pessimist. The Eurocracy doesn't obey anyone's interests, it's a headless blunder. This lobbying thing has been a real eye-opener, they have absolutely 0 concept of economic realities and will hose everyone, including Big Business, without giving it a thought. I can't also help but feel that they are seriously over-staffed due to the eastern expansion, and are thinking up new initiatives simply to keep themselves occupied. Certainly feels that way. Case in point: they believe there is a market disturbance because small building companies using highly experimental technologies can't receive cheap liability coverage/performance guarantees.

I think we should have a rule that whenever something says that franchise x isn't what it used to be, thread gets automatically locked.

I'll just say that, as a rule, things are and appear very different if you're from the U.S. or from Europe - and talking about Europe as a whole is, of course, generally a bad idea. Peaceful coexistence can't happen without shared values and cultural symbols, multiculturalism is an utopia.

Very.

For me, it was always more of a seductive call of high speed rigs and passing trains. In my case, it passed. Not sure if permanently, but getting to a point where I'm at least respected, if not loved, rather than ignored by my peers has helped a lot. Of course, if my peers didn't consist of people who post picture of their 1000 euro shoes in a nightclub on tuesdays (considerately mentioning the price), I might not have spent so much time thinking about the futility of it all. **** it, I'm getting depressed again...

Well we don't really *need* games in general I feel, so that's kind of a moot question. You definitely feel like you don't need anything Dragon Age though, as you've stated time and time and again. Personally, with all its flaws, I appreciate Origins and its expansion, and I feel like something potentially interesting could be done with the setting, so I take a wait and see approach. I had essentially three problems with DAII: 1) it cut a lot of stuff that I thought had potential of the original, like the Origins, and generally went into a more Mass Effect direction (not to say that you can't make a good RPG like that, but Origins was a promising sign because it looked like BioWare wasn't trying to standardize all of their games); 2) the combat felt hectic but not tactically interesting and none of my problems with DA:O's combat were solved (balance issues, poor encounter design, and a rather obscured/non-transparent ruleset); 3) the storyline, which pre-release seemed to be the most promising thing, was.. yeah. What I will do is basically wait and see if any of these three has been improved on, try a demo if it eventually is released, and decide based on that. EDIT: Just to be clear, I don't own DAII and my impressions are based on the demo, various Let's Plays of it I watched, and what I heard about the game from other people that own it. I guess I *could* listen to Nepenthe and try the full game, but to be honest, I'm fairly sure I'd feel like I wasted my money afterwards. *cries* You have no idea how disturbing I find your post with the edit.