Raithe

a hobby is always a matter of perception and perspective.. shame on you Purkake, lame to one person is exciting to another.. tis the way of the world.

And at least while they do compare it to ME...they also mention that it was being made before ME was released..

I'm fairly motivated for it's release... Obsessed might be a touch extreme, but it's the game that I'm really focused on this year.

I'm pretty sure I recall there being some mention that not all missions relate to the main storyline.. That there are missions which you can choose to do just for the benefits of improving relations with certain NPC's, to gain intel on others.. things like that... Of course, that's relying on some hazy memory of earlier interviews...

I'm theorising that it will have passive abilties that reduce chance of knock back/down from cqb attacks, and such like... Rather then greater health, just a touch more likely to shrug off damage or act as if it isn't so bad. "Tis but a flesh wound..."

Taking the interviews together, it sounds like increasing skills with particular weapons will give you improvements to their use (damage, amount of recoil, the small things) and open up a mixture of passive / active abilties to use with those weapons.. but at the same time they've built it so that people who have serious "twitch" skills can treat it like a standard shooter if they don't bother to improve the gun skills..

Not a bad little interview...

Good luck then with the shift in work. And enjoy San Fran.

As of yet, there's been no announcement of a PC port.. they seem to be keeping this latest offering to the ps3 and xbox 360 for the moment... of course give it a year or two and it probably will be ported..but at the moment..

"A man may fight for many things. His country, his friends, his principles, the glistening ear on the cheek of a golden child. But personally, I'd mud-wrestle my own mother for a ton of cash, an amusing clock and a sack of French porn. " - Blackadder, "Something is always wrong, Balders. The fact that I am not a millionaire aristocrat with the sexual capacity of a rutting rhino is a constant niggle." - Blackadder,

I have to say.. there's a patch of music in the middle of that.. that is very, very deus exy...

Always on top of things funcroc

Sir David Niven to the troops he led on D-Day during the beach approach : ""Look, you chaps only have to do this once. But I'll have to do it all over again in Hollywood with Errol Flynn!" Asked by suspicious American sentries during the Battle of the Bulge who had won the World Series in 1943, Niven replied: "Haven't the foggiest idea . . . But I did co-star with Ginger Rogers in Bachelor Mother!"

..Dang nabbit, and now WoTC have announced officially that they won't be continuing with the license.. So the Unknown Regions sourcebook coming out in a month will be the last thing they do..

Yup, most games I play look fine on my widescreen monitor.. I see no point to the hassle of hooking up to the tv screen with the majority of games... Ah well, but to each their own I suppose.

I'm going with the odds being they'll be guest spots ala Wrex in ME2.. potentially shifting the way a world / group reacts to you (regarding whether they're dead, alive, loyal or not). Not something as overly complicated that it could get if you could take them along as squad-members. There's going to have to be some influence felt from ME2 beyond the basic storyline aspect.. And since the majority of 2 is about the squad members rather then the plot..

"Skipping details like whether science could actually do it or the country could pay for it, JFK declared that by 1970 America would put at least one guy on the moon then (as a recruiting tool) bring him back alive. We weren't around, but we've always pictured the NASA guys hearing that and doing spit takes. At any rate, America's best and brightest nerds had a decade-minus to cash the check JFK's mouth had written. Kennedy himself then busied himself with other affairs of state, like Marilyn Monroe...."

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Entertaining if you like Terry Gilliam films.. although I think I enjoyed Baron Munchausen more.. It did leave me curious how the storyline was originally meant to have gone.. but still not a bad film.

"It's not easy for some to accept, but the Soviet Union really did spend decades of time and untold fortunes in efforts to undermine non-communist government arounds the world. The USSR attempted to use espionage, propaganda, two-headed transplant operations, blackmail, the Olympic games, murder, kidnapping, ESP, military force, drugs, lies, imprisonment, ballet, torture, terrorism, and an army of half-man, half-ape soldiers (no, we're not making any of this up) to make the globe turn red. Those commies really did want to take over the world, were quite ruthless about it, and non-jackasses should be supremely grateful they failed. If the Soviets had won the Cold War, their system would have been imposed on us and (for a start) many of us smart-ass gamer types would be gulag-bound. Sure, there are those who say America is a fascist country, but here's a test for them. If a person can criticize his government for being fascist without winding up dead or in jail, it's not really fascist. Moreover, everyone who has lived in a real totalitarian state earns the right to punch them for trivializing their plight. The previous section outlined a litany of sins the USSR commited during its losing effort in the Cold War. It's a matter of public record that the US and its chosen allies did pretty much all the same things to win (no half-ape super-soldiers though). To be sure, it was often for shorter periods of times and in smaller numbers, but it happened all the same. Was it worth it for the sake of democracy, etc.?"

One of the journalists who got to see/play one of the previews did say that going through the mission guns blazing was much faster then sneaking. Apparently, you actually have to be careful if you try being discrete and sneak past people... and this takes longer then just running around with bullets flying... The storyline mechanic also uses a flash forward / flashback technique.... Almost as if Mike (your character) is being debriefed on what's happened and then it flashes back to the mission and you make your choices... Then it jumps back to the debriefing/conversation. (and I'm fairly sure it was mentioned that choices in the debriefing converstion will affect the way flashbacks happen). Also the flashforward is to help reveal some of the consequences of the choices you make.. Not sure on the total "length" of the game in a single playthru.. but it has been reported that there are 12 hours or so of cinematics in the game. In a single playthrough, a player will see about 4 of them. Also, since so much has been made of how different choices and play styles will really alter how the game goes, I'm seeing a lot of replay value in it...

Quite a few people are comparing it to a Deus Ex style of gameplay from what they've seen.. Various hubs that you can move between, and can choose when and which you move between them. Different missions opening up in the hubs that again, you can choose to do in different order... Within each mission there are multiple ways to carry them out.. not sure how much back and forth/exploration can occur while on a mission or whether you'll be channeled always forward by events... But they wanted to make sure that if you choose to put all your skill points on Technical Aptitude/Sabotage or Sneak/Martial Arts you can go through without having to wave guns around .. or if you've dumped all your skill points on the different guns you can blow lots of things up and expend large amounts of lead Obsidian hasn't really mentioned much about the levelling up that I've seen, but the choosing how you spend your skill points has been fairly covered. As you put more points on a skill you gain a mixture of passive abilties that are always active, and active abilties that grant special moves when you activate them. There are, 9 skills I believe: Assault Rifles, Pistols, Shotguns, Submachine Guns, Martial Arts, Toughness, Stealth, Technical Aptitude, and Sabotage. From what's been said, missions can be changed to differing degrees depending on what missions/hubs/people encountered previously.. so different options and attitudes will open up depending completely on what order you've chosen to do things... Also, the morality of the game has been discussed a fair bit. There's no good/bad switch, they're keeping to the idea of the "grey" spy lifestyle. Characters in the game are supposed to react to you depending on the choices you've made, whether you've been aggressive, professional, suave.. whether you've approached things in a "kill everyone and their mother" or if missions have been ghosted and no deaths... You can research characters and find out what sort of approaches they favour, so it's possible to try tailoring your choices to how you want them to respond to you... but other characters will react differently. (That's one of the key points to me.. I really want to see how much the "choice & consequences" will play out) The game's been in development for awhiles, but it's been delayed a few times. I've had it on pre-order since it was originally meant to be released back in February last year.

"Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mold-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final." - Dr Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt

I seem to remember that in some interview they mentioned that the reason that most of the team from ME1 were only "background" characters in ME2 was so they would definitely be alive for ME3... which hints that they should have important roles in the final game. I'll guess that they'll probably do something similar to Wrex in ME2 for all the suicide squad team-mates in ME3.. a location where you get one reception if they made it through alive, and another if they died. Although the potentially interesting character-wise moments will be the question of how romances in ME1 will react to those in ME2.. Ashley meeting Miranda or the like... How much that might have an effect on the story. Or whether it'll be standard BioLite Romance-Space Opera...

I do have to say.. apart from a Hitman Bloodmoney graphics glitch, I've never had any problem with things working on Vista....