Thorton_AP

Was this still the case in Mass Effect 2? I've been giving it a try and so far haven't noticed any "different dialogue options leads to the same VO" but the first two dialogues were pretty trivial, and I've only really spoken to Jacob so far. It's a crazy time consuming process but I haven't noticed dialogue options at any point having the VO line associated with them in the early going.

Yeah typically I have enjoyed Blizzard's stories. I still need to play WC3 actually....

Most stories can probably be classified as "generic" in some capacity. So much so I feel the word "generic" is overused and has become virtually meaningless. A "generic" story that is well written and can evoke an emotional attachment to the characters is still an excellent story.

Yeah I liked it in AP as well. Which is probably why I have some optimism for it.

What I am hoping for from the framed narrative is more of a "You made a big choice and instead of waiting 40 hours to see a blurb about it in some epilogue slide show, we can actually fast forward a bit and have you actually play through the consequences of your actions instead of just read about it." But then, I'm a hopeless optimist

Meh, I'm sticking with my assessment in the meantime.

LOL touche

I read this and found this: I am a bit worried about them taking liberties with "my story" as I play the game, but then I started thinking. I bet what is happening is the demo is probably the very start of the game, and they start you out with very powerful abilities and whatnot to give players an idea of what a high level character of this class plays like. Heck, if they use a type of "framed narrative" they could be showing off a sequence closer towards the end of the game. Don't know how it'll play out, but I think it's too bold of a move to simply have the story play out the way the "Storytellers" are describing it without any consideration for the choices and actions that the player actually made. If this is the way they do things I bet it backfires immensely. Giving the player a taste of what he'll become though, might be interesting. It might be too much to handle for a newer player, but at the same time it might help a player decide "this class isn't for me" early in the game. Just taking crap and throwing it up against the wall

The crit path in BG2 is shorter because, as you state yourself, a lot of the content is optional. I have no doubt that I can beat Baldur's Gate 2 in significantly less time than I could beat Dragon Age. DA takes longer to play, and less of the content is optional. I think this is, in general, a bad thing. I'd support a move similar to Baldur's Gate 2, where there's a lot of content, but more of it is optional (cost of game development seems to be hindering this though).

It's easier to continue such stuff when your game is cheaper to make, and when the crit path of said game is also significantly shorter. I am comparing the production costs from 2000 to 2009, and the general consensus is that they have escalated and mean that optimal sales are becoming more and more necessary. In other words, I see the time spent on BG2 strongholds as being less of a "grand feature" given it's less connected to the rest of the game as the Origin stories and probably (adjusted for the inflationary spike in production) not as expensive of a decision to make.

Baldur's Gate 2 is a significantly shorter crit-path game. It was probably orders of magnitude cheaper to make too.

Does the social site have any stats for most common character or anything like that? If 80% of people all picked human noble I can imagine there'd be some disappointment with respect to the effort put into the Origin stories. I think the length of the game is a large handicap in this regard. Decisions that you make probably aren't transparent enough that players don't get the "reinforcement cookie" that something they did 30 hours ago actually changed something now, and the sheer length of the game I think makes it intimidating for restaring with a different origin story.

Who has purple hair?

Was ME2 better? I seem to remember the general idea was 3 typical options to choose from which was "Friendly/Nice," "Neutral" "Aggressive" I only played through ME2 twice though so obviously I hadn't chosen every dialogue action. Could always load 'er back up again I suppose to verify

Hopefully stuff like Steam can help improve that. I switched from a Mac user growing up due to the poorer selection of games myself.

Depending on the cost of the service, something like OnLive is interesting. I don't suspect it's something that I would bother using and there's going to undoubtedly be huge growing pains in the short term, but if it can get more people playing games that otherwise wouldn't, I see that as a good thing.

In the original Fallout's I would typically always aim for the eyes as well as it resulted in the most amount of fatal hits for me.

Felecia Day seemed to enjoy it

According to Wikipedia, it seems numbers man is correct that you don't need to use Steam with Steamworks (NBA 2K9 did just this). The best I can conclude is that the only thing that requires Steamworks is using the Steamworks DRM (which near as I can tell, is pretty much just Steam). Though I imagine use of some of the other features (achievement tracking, Steam Cloud) and so forth probably also need Steam access in some way. I'd need NBA 2K9 to verify though :\ EDIT: Some examples of the uncompromising principles of competitor DD services can be found here and here and her. (pretty much all reporting the same story) Shack news nicely points out for us that these competitors are upset because of MW2's inclusion of Steam, stating that as the reason why they won't use it. Shack News also nicely points out that D2D and GamersGate do, in fact, sell games that require Steam (actually, it looks like Direct2Drive actually sells Modern Warfare 2).

Irrelevant. ****, when did Vol infect you with his disease? It's irrelevant to look at ONLY the digital distribution schemes if it only looks at a smaller subset of the total sales. According to Joystiq, digital distribution accounted for 36 percent of sales. This means Steam accounts for about 25% of all PC game sales. Furthermore, looking back, we clearly aren't specifically talking discussing digital distribution since he already mentioned his grievance about RETAIL games with Steamworks requiring Steam to be installed. Since this all started from a hope from MW that the EU would intervene, I'm sure numbers man was a big supporter of the Eurocommies intervening on Microsoft's Internet Explorer distribution as well (I was not). If the EU does intervene and gets the same results, what it will likely mean is that Steamworks will no longer be allowed to exist in its current form. I believe that there's a greater chance of this ****ing over developers that obviously see some value in using Steamworks, since they are choosing to use Steamworks for the games. Developers do NOT use Steamworks so that they can use Steam, as Numbers man suggested with this post (emphasis mine): You can clearly use Steam without using Steamworks, since many games do.

Do you think it would be worth a Steam pre-order in order to get Mafia 1?

I use gear score. I don't see RealIDs in the tooltip when using it.

I found the Redcliffe area (which I went to first) to be a very challenging part of the game. Died a lot. Played on the PC.

Irrelevant. Opportunities to acquires the software in other ways still exist. This sounds like Mom and Pop small time retailer crying because they don't have the economies of scale to compete with Walmart. What I have to say: Muffin. Since you state that you can use Steamworks but not Steam itself (I am unaware of this), are you saying that game developers continue to voluntarily use both Steam and Steamworks? Does this mean that mandatory Steam usage is actually a decision the developer is making? (and before you bemoan me for sidestepping and cherry picking points, as well as making assumptions... but I guess you probably only did it because I did first right After all, you don't need to ask the devs why they use Steamworks: You've already drawn your own conclusions. I'm reminded of Something Awful right now...) We were discussing your incorrect assumption that devs needs to use Steamworks to use Steam as a distribution service. So it's a special case because you like it? You stated "there are no alternatives to Steam." I point out a similar example, and you basically go "but, but, but." There are plenty of games that I can only get from a single source (Matrix Games, for example), and there are plenty of games that force me to use DRMs that aren't required for selling a game (oh, we made an excuse for that one too now didn't we... I think that was Tigranes). I go to smaller retail stores and frequently find that games I want to buy aren't in stock, so I have to go to a big chain. Especially if the game is not a particularly big release. I tend to be fairly right-wing and don't believe that the government needs to start stepping in here because they'll just **** things up more. Since developers seem to feel there is an advantage to using Steamworks (instead of just utilizing Steam as a distribution service which is an alternative), you seem to be advocating that the option and benefits that developers get with Steamworks should be denied to the developers? It's hard to make sense here since you're apparently willing to make concessions for other similar business models if you like the service they provide.

They typically had 3 (I would say almost always had 3, since top right was typically friendly, right was neutral, and bottom right was aggressive), with the occasional 4th and sometimes 5th (usually dependent on whether or not you had sufficient renegade/paragon, but not always). This doesn't include the investigate options, which often had all 5 options available, though probably fairly typically between 3-5.