pmp10

it's better than in Witcher or DA2 I wouldn't know as I haven't played either but "horrid" in my original post refereed to mouse&keyboard controls. As for my problems with combat system - they may not be very common, the game simply insists on using mechanics I hate with a passion.

Well that demo left me unimpressed. It's not only the horrid controls but also the camera problems and the way combat system was designed. It's nice that good deal of attention was paid to the story and characters but in this type of game I hold those issues secondary to the gameplay.

I was unaware it had to. Between quite numerous gameplay elements, locations, missions and mostly open-ended nature of the terrain it seems to be quite obvious on what kind of game it is.

No but that may be because AC games attempts to maintain some lose hold on realism.

We do? While E3 certainly makes sense aren't game announcements usually the domain of the (hitherto undetermined) publisher?

That comparison isn't entirely valid as there is a huge difference between those two countries. US has options Germany can't dream of, for example it has access to almost 100k square km of desert.

It was probably Fallout New Vegas and after that he went to their new project ("Defiance" or something). Defiance was an idea that wasn't accepted by Squre-Enix - hence Dungeon Siege 3. Once this and New Vegas DLCs ship we only know of some kind of 2D game as far as Obsidian projects go.

Speaking of which: . And it gets a giant WTF from me. The last thing I want is for this game to go style over substance.

Can't say I agree on that. Existence of loot and similar camera position doesn't necessarily put those games in the same genre. And even if they were the comparison is pointless as they launched at completely different price points.

Or maybe they focus on other game aspects more in line with the expectation of their target audience? You just need to look at AP reviews to see that European gamers have somewhat different expectations.

Then either you had the right version for your console or that game was region free. Software released for NA audience will be aimed at a NTSF standard and while there is a possibility that the demo isn't region restricted it is something to think about.

For that you'd need to somehow get billing approved and risk encountering region lock. It's not really worth it.

Hasn't there been only one score above 80 though? 14/20 would more or less indicate a 7 which, depending on the publication, means either "average" or "mediocre". And I may be wrong, but I remember the reception for other action-RPG these last few years (see Torchlight) to be much more enthusiastic, albeit not quite as much as for AAA titles (for obvious reasons). I'd just like to understand whether it's a problem within the game, a mismatch of expectations (maybe they were expecting deeper RPG elements and a more modern presentation?) or if it's just the genre in general to receive such a lukewarm response. Really 70-75% is better than average even accounting for modern score inflation. And we can't really compare the game to Torchlight (indy game) just as we can't compare it to Guardian of Light (XBL/PSN) or DDO (pseudo-mmo). Since DS3 launches for a full price in retail it's production values will be judged against the AAA titles. If it doesn't present anything exceptional in other areas it's simply unlikely to consistently score 80% (or more) because the high budget is clearly not there.

Really if those issues were that simple they would be solved long ago. And funnily enough the complains are about the means of power distribution not the form of it's generation. Because its not so easy. For 60 years nuclear industry ran on uranium. Even if all the problems involving thorium were solved it will take decades for such a major change to occur. There is plenty of wishful thinking but little intent to pay for a serious R&D process. And it's hardly surprising, it is said that today we could have a fusion plant build in 5 years. You only need to find someone to foot the 30 billion $ bill for something that may never work. Fusion may be the technology of the future but the politicians need to be reelected today not 30 years from now.

So much for keeping European gamers in mind. They better make sure to properly region lock it. It will certainly hit the net a lot sooner.

I'm not sure how you intend to measure the level of 'bombing' but don't you think that the target audience is decided upon by the publisher?

That is interesting as Square Enix recently canceled another attempt at a western FF spin off. There are accusations that Square torpedoed that project. Link

It doesn't but if that is your chosen occupation then it certainly doesn't excuse you. Nobody forced obsidian to get into the business of making sequels, but since they did they should effectively compensate for lack of technological familiarity. And yet the general opinion is to the contrary. And in my experience the problem isn't only the prevalence of bugs but also their severity. Nwn1 could crash - nwn2 would hard-lockup the pc, F3 would crash if abused - NV will crash for no apparent reason and freeze the overlay forcing a blind restart. Tech support may mark such issues using the same term but the impact on my experience is significantly different.

That would actually by a valid argument if whole idea behind obsidian wasn't making sequels to games created by other studios. Unless of course you believe F3 fanbase would be fine with a switch to an isometric perspective.

So you are saying that after bethesda spend 2 years patching Fallout 3 in your experience obsidian didn't introduce nearly so many bugs while working with the same engine? Glorious achievement indeed.

I seriously doubt that. And even if the number of bugs is similar the severity is not. I don't ever remember bethesda softworks games losing savegames, in fact the most common bug that I do remember from Fallout3 was crash on quit. People have started to ask if a game is "obsidian-buggy" for a reason.

Let me guess: demo is a timed exclusive for gaming magazines?

Possibly but how would we know? It's certainly the worst received obsidian game to date. We have an chicken or egg problem here. Sadly I'm not so sure about that. The psychological barrier at 70% separates the games that got major elements to an ok levels from the rest. I'm doubtful whether the stealth system as implemented in AP would qualify. Because there was no marketing. Not sure if the company they had hired for the marketing dropped the ball or what happened, but I remember them changing the PR company they use in US and after that we could actually see some marketing for the game. There was never going to be a major marketing campaign for AP. It simply didn't have the graphic or cutscenes to generate serious hype. It's promotional material was pretty standard for obsidian (i.e. pretty low budget). They played strongly the c&c part of the game but the reality is that long term plot developments and npc interaction don't make much impression during trailers. And AP still sold reasonably well but at the expense of obsidian reputation.

That was just one of many complaints raised against the shooting mechanics and it mostly steamed from the fact a lot of them were badly introduced and counter-intuitively executed. Even if the shooting was absolutely perfect there was a host of other issues involving cover, stealth, gadgets ,h2h fighting, boss battles etc. You can't really lie them all at segas feet. I find it really hard to imagine that some exec came to obsidian and simply demanded that the stealth system be unresponsive.

That is a little one sided view of things. The 'publishers fault' is not a new issue that comes about when defending obsidian games and frankly they aimed at AAA status but delivered a game that failed to even reach 70% on metacritic. I could certainly see reasons why sega would not be happy with obsidian. The whole fiasco look like a mess of conflicting expectations. I think sega wanted a more straight up RPG while obsidians plan were for a 3rd person action game with NPC interaction and C&C.