WDeranged

I guess I was hoping for the player character to be a little less special. Oh well. Were you wanting to be the dragonborn's errand boy? Always more interesting to be the power behind the throne rather than on the throne itself. You just described Oblivion

I thought everyone and his dog knew the player would be dragonborn

I'm resisting the urge to try Rift, I've got enough digital distractions to last me a lifetime as it is, on a related note Shogun 2 should be sliding through my letterbox tomorrow

I disliked Alistair because he was always either whining or disagreeing with me, just one of those things, it's not like I didn't try Has anyone else noticed the elves in DA2 have been slightly Avatar'd? The idea had crept into my mind before but last night I realised what they've done, the eyes are bigger and the nose is flatter, seems Bio are trying to tap into the weird empathy people have for blue cartoon cats.

That school sounds a bit reactionary, I've heard some of Ken Robinson's talks before and he sounds like a decent chap though, I'm not qualified to propose a solution but it seems to me we need a balance, all I know is that I was bored as hell for my entire "structured" school life and I learnt more when I left.

On the climate change thing, as far as I see tell there are no reputable sources claiming a connection, there is however a bit of scaremongering from the usual types. Heres a good article. He makes a good point that the BBC's dedicated coverage of the nuclear reactor might be a bit unbalanced compared to the ongoing chaos caused by the actual earthquake.

I lost my save ages ago so I had to go with one of the defaults, my warden was a self glorifying bastard so I picked the darker preset, I was quite glad it worked out that way though.

He's not wrong, artistic direction comes a very close second though, graphics are the first thing people see (ha!), you don't release audio clips, it's screenshots, it's got to be snappy if you're fishing in the mainstream.

I've just noticed they got Stephen Merchant to do voice acting in Portal 2, that puts it to the top of my list.

I played another four hours tonight, I just reached Isabella and she's pretty cool, she'll have chronic back problems by her 40's though... The best moment so far was , perfect. *edit* I say "just reached", 16 hours in, I like that I could apparently have missed her completely.

When you select an AOE you can tap the function keys (1-4) to select another character and position the spell from their perspective, it helps ease the pain of a locked camera.

Yeah just a little bit more reach on the camera would make all the difference, surely they can patch that.

Yeah, the darkspawn are another thing I'm glad to see pushed into the background, I quite like their creation myth, the whole marching an army into heaven thing sounded cool but they were just a shapeless big bad to go and kill, though apparently they got more interesting in Awakening, I still need to play that.

Total War: Shogun 2 looks pretty good.

I thought the ogre in Origins was pretty cool, I just wondered how the hell they got it all the way up to the top of that tower.

I felt like that during Origins, the world was generic, almost teeth pullingly dull, all the while you're picking up codex entries telling you about distant lands with far more hardcore **** going on, I was pretty glad to find out Kirkwall was a Tevinter city, character designs are a big step up too, now I can actually distinguish between attackers at a glance. Volourn was the one who brought up the ME2 comparison btw, though I do agree with him, which is...odd

My inner darkling secretly hopes Bioware overreact to this fuss, Dragon Age 3 could be harder to control than a nuclear sub

"The year is 2020. Climate change has been ignored. Cities are underwater. People are starving. Nations brace for war. Species are dying." Oh dear, it's not meant to be funny is it, I thought they were going for a darkly satirical spin on world issues, climate change is going to have to hurry up a bit if we're to have underwater cities by 2020, at least the game looks quite nice? Not for me though.

I know, the mind boggles

Get the f*** out of here. That guy can't be real. I'm surprised how anyone can interview him for that long, he's manic like a crackhead

I remember Kirkbride making a few vaguely snarky comments on the forums after Oblivion came out, considering he rarely talks in anything but riddles I'll take this as good news. Aside from the obvious technical improvements this is what I hope is meant, lots of Morrowind's sidequests are interesting from a story perspective but as an actual gaming activity they're ****ing dull, Oblivion had comparatively rich sidequests but with way too much derpery in the plot department. I've got a good feeling about Skyrim though, it's rare that I agree with everything I hear leading up to a new game's release but so far I haven't hated any of the titbits we're getting.

Got to agree with Volo too, it feels like a sequel to me and I can't quite get my head around the scale of backlash, especially as I'm firmly in the anti-streamlining camp, I hate the ****ing word but Dragon Age 2 is not the iconic example of dumbing down that it's being made out to be. Maybe this is just one of those "idea who's time has come" moments and Dragon Age 2 is the beating boy, all but the most mongoloid gamers are thinking along the same lines, we're tired of being treated like an averaged statistic...maybe I'm just being hopefully deluded. Either way I'll be playing the game for a good few hours tonight, possibly enjoying myself despite it's obvious flaws.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-03-...ge-ii-interview

It doesn't look maxed out to me, have you downloaded the high res texture pack yet Bokishi? It makes quite a huge difference to exterior scenes.