mkreku

I was going to play Two Worlds 2.. grr

Two Worlds 2 NOT released tomorrow, new release date not decided upon: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-09-...-worlds-ii-date DAMNIT

THERE CAN NEVER BE TOO MUCH BARE BOOBIES

Anyone who understands what the mutt is really saying. A parrot is someone repeating stuff without reflecting upon it. How "two tour vet" or reading foreign papers would have any relevance to this is beyond me. I would probably care about the second part of the sentence if I didn't realize I was replying to a guy who'll **** his pants if I folded a piece of paper the wrong way.

I'm more intrigued by this game than I probably should be, in light of how much I disliked the previous two games in the series.

I always thought of action RPG's as games where combat is the main attraction (Diablo, Sacred, Torchlight etc). Which is why is mystifies me when people refer to the Gothic games as action RPG's.. or Deus Ex as an action RPG.. or even Mass Effect as action RPG's. Just because an RPG has action doesn't mean it is automatically an action RPG! Must be a left-over way of thinking from the time when RPG's were spreadsheets and the combat was turn based..

And this is why I mentioned Dungeon Lords earlier, as it was based on both player skill and in-game skill. Unskilled lockpickers get a mini-game that's impossible (unless it is the easiest lock type), no matter the player skill. Skilled lockpickers get a mini-game that's easy (unless it is the most difficult lock type), no matter the player skill. Everyone in-between will struggle or breeze through, depending on lock type and player skill. Crude locks are possible for unskilled players and a breeze for skilled players. Complex locks are impossible for unskilled players and possible for skilled players. It still is the best lockpick solution I've seen in any game. It only had one flaw: when you were a super-skilled lockpicker (in-game skill), it would take longer to open a crude lock than it would for an unskilled lockpicker (due to the way the mini-game was set up), even though it was impossible to fail the game. They should have added an automatic lockpick function for unfailable locks/lockpicking skill combinations.

I don't know why it amuses me so much knowing that you paid three times as much for the exact same part as I did (i7 920 @ 3.2 GHz). Schadenfreude.

My god, Tale, that must be the crappiest game idea I've ever heard of.

No Big Brother building infra structure. No Big Brother putting out the fire when your house is burning. No Big Brother trying to catch the criminal that just robbed you. No Big Brother to aid you when you want to have a child. No Big Brother to aid you when your child falls ill. No Big Brother to teach your child the valuables of life. No Big Brother telling that dude in the 18-wheeler that he can't just run over your Mini. No Big Brother interfering when your investments run off to a Caribbean island. No Big Brother trying to evacuate you after your excessive Humvee driving might have flooded your state. No, you need not go on. We all realize what an ignoramus you are. You throw around that Big Brother term without actually knowing what you're talking about. A society is simply people helping each other, but I'm guessing it suits your absurd self image as some sort of Captain America Freedom Fighter to keep calling it Big Brother. Mindless parrot.

What's the big deal? We don't even have freedom of speech on this very American board, ****suckers.

The reason I used that specific example is because it's been done already. In Gothic 2 from 2002. And yes, the only way to find the place was to brush up against the wall and walk through the vines (unless you'd found the guy who'd given you the right clue, but that's another matter). It did look right just walking through them, but then again.. it was 2002, the year of the immobile vines. My point is merely that it CAN be as simple as I suggest to reward the player. It doesn't have to involve heavy scripting, massive art resources, complex tools. It is possible to add detail that keep people talking about your game for years to come just by using a little ingenuity.

Contemporary times for me. I wish someone could make an interesting RPG without having to add magic or paranormal events. Oh, and I'd want the gaming aspects of it not consist of killing things. Fast and the Furious RPG? You'd have to drive around and solve quests, upgrade your car and you'd gain experience points from winning races. Maybe not the best movie example.. Football RPG. Start out as a teenager in a small town, play your way through the system until you reach the national level, complete with trying to get noticed by scouts, dealing with injury, getting sponsors, etc. I know I've written this before but I am just so sick of killing things.

I still wish more games would steal the picklock minigame from Dungeon Lords..

Yes, because rats were so enormously fun to fight in the earlier Fallout's..

Yes, I do realize I generalized too much. I agree that time is always the deciding factor when it comes to extra detail like the ones I am discussing (and the topic starter too). I am not sure, however, that I fully agree with the technology and tools factors. First, the kind of detail and "secret passages" I am referring to doesn't actually have to be very complicated. For secret passages, it might be as simple as having a small ravine winding through a rocky part of the landscape. The ravine walls would be pretty simple rock textures on relatively flat surfaces, covered with hanging vines for variety. An ordinary world builder would place a few rocks here and there, fill out the place with as much detail as needed and move on to the next area. No matter if the tools were weak and the technology constrained, the builder would have to work within the limits of both and still make the best of the situation. A great world builder would admittedly spend a few hours more on the same area, but he would trade away a few rocks, remove a man sized part of the wall halfway through the ravine and add a hidden cave entrance behind the thick vines (making the entrance invisible unless you happened to walk up against and through the vines). With a few less rocks lying around and a relatively small cave behind the vines (with perhaps one strong encounter and one chest), both the polygon and memory quotas would be quite similar in both examples. Time would obviously be a factor (as testing the new area, placing the cave layout and the movement restrictions, or whatever they are called, and the two new entities would take more time than placing a few more rocks along the ravine wall), but both examples should be doable within the same tools and tech. The difference being more time used by the builder, more creative freedom/artistic inspiration/hand-on approach required by the builder.. and a whole crapload of more fun for the player. Most often it is these small, almost insignificant little details that move a game from the mediocre into the interesting range for me. The above example is actually an example stolen from Gothic 2. Another example (from Gothic) would be the hollow rock that noone in the entire world discovered until several years after the game was released! It was so clever, demanded almost no resources and yet it had the entire Gothic community talking about it for months. It was a single large rock lying next to a river, just at the beginning of the game. It was big and round and surrounded by weeds that grew around the rock and down into the streaming water. There was absolutely nothing special about it, except that it was one of the bigger rocks along the river. Everyone who played the game passed that rock probably a hundred times during one playthrough. A few years after release someone was swimming in the river close to the rock, even though there was a path and a bridge very nearby so swimming really wasn't necessary. At some point this person decided to dive in the shallow water, and happened upon this rock. As it was surrounded by weeds it was difficult to see underwater so he swam closer and noticed that the water actually got deeper the closer he got to the rock. When he swam through the weeds, he realized that there was a very narrow 'tunnel' going up under the rock and that the rock was hollow! So he swam up under the rock and entered the tiny space underneath it. In there was a goblin skeleton and a few trinkets and gold (if I remember correctly). That little place might as well have gone unnoticed forever. Still, it was there. Someone had spent the time and effort of making something that 99.99% would not find.. unless someone mentioned it in a walkthrough. THIS is the amount of detail that impresses me. THIS is the reason why I keep replaying the Gothic games. THIS is what I wish every game world designer would aspire to. Piranha Bytes are the masters of this. Everywhere you look, you're rewarded with something. It might just be a few gold coins, a meal of food, a small note (another Gothic 2 famous moment..), but it shows the designers didn't just phone in their effort. They reward the players with their own time.

Best of the GTA series, according to me. Also the only GTA game I've bothered modding. There are two mods that are cool for more modern computers. One that increases the drawing distance so you'll be able to see houses all across the gigantic map (it still looks impressive!) and one that replaces the fake car names with real life car names. That was all I needed to have 100+ hours of fun.

A quick look at a few of Arcania's quests, with English voice actors: http://www.arcania-game.com/?lang=en&ID=1897 The main character sounds good, but the other characters vary wildly in quality. Still better than Two Worlds, and I survived that.

I forgot about Divinity 2 altogether!

Dead Rising is one of the few games I've played to completion on the Xbox 360. Fantastic game. I'm also looking forward to the sequel. Just hoping they haven't 'streamlined' it too much compared to the quirky original.

The only reason would be uninspired world builders and/or too strictly hierarchical personnel management. As an example: Piranha Bytes (admittedly a much smaller team) seems to leave their world builders/designers with fairly free hands in regards to what they are allowed to build and implement. Therefore their worlds are chock-full of cool details, hidden loot, special encounters, secret passages, easter eggs, you name it. All this on top of already supremely well designed game worlds. We don't know anything about Obsidian when it comes to this so it'll be interesting to see what they have done with Dungeon Siege 3 (and, first, Fallout: New Vegas).

I think it looks great. Like a slightly friendlier Demon's Souls. Never saw any framerate problems.

I mostly found humour in the way Bethesda's designers played with the surroundings and the props in Fallout 3. If you looked around, you'd notice there was a lot of detail everywhere, even in what might look like a generic ruined building on a prairie somewhere. It's not the same humour as in Fallout or Fallout 2, but saying there's no humour is wrong. One of my favourites was the store where someone had put almost every object in the store as sort of a giant domino puzzle. If you let it fall, it triggered some sort of trap at the end. Unfortunately, I never could get it to work properly (as in me getting in the door, stepping on the pressure plate and setting off the domino trap from beginning to end).

I was gonna write something intyelligent, but just as I started writing this post, I felt the need to throw up. Oh em gee. Goung to bed now

I believe theslug 100% more than some of the 'contributions' in this thread. Whoever claims he's sleeping with 3 models per week is a liar unless there's pictures involved. My opinion. Good times, sluggie.