AGX-17

Like NV, P:E is going to revolve around individual faction/town/etc. reputations rather than some global 1-100 morality scale or the D&D alignment matrix. Your reputation with any given faction is going to be a reflection of that faction's implicit set of values and morals. Computers have logic without emotion. Emotion and logic are two separate realms. They're both products of the brains capable of them, and thus can be influenced and overridden by each other, but logic isn't an extension of emotion. Logic can and does exist outside of the realm of biology and emotion. Math doesn't have emotions, and yet it is the purest, most infallible form of logic, capable of describing the universe and predicting unknowns about it with unparalleled accuracy. Emotion drives humans to engage in logical pursuits, but logic is not rooted in emotion. Emotion overwhelmingly leads humans to make irrational decisions, not rational ones. In the case of psychopaths, it varies. Spree-killers who go on a one-off rampage are usually driven to do so by stresses in their circumstance (and may not be psychopaths in truth,) but most successful serial killers use reason and plan their crimes ahead of time, often choosing targets on the basis of minimizing their chances of being caught (a rational course of action.) While it's the pursuit of a twisted pleasure that drives such behavior, they can still use rational thought to plan their actions in order to avoid the negative consequences that would come of being caught. In other words, emotionally defective or damaged people incapable of empathy are still wholly capable of using logic and reason. People who've suffered severe trauma can still be functioning members of society, it's not a given that all victims of certain traumas are all psychotic pedophiles or drug-addicted husks.

I don't see how this is an issue. What few cRPGs have been made in the last half decade or so have, in my memory, all had characters sheathe their weapons out of combat. This isn't 1998, after all. I think adding various states of weapon drawn-ness and linking them to character interaction is taking things a bit too far. Details are nice, but details are also a bog.

Aren't successful hits by AOE spells/skills "collision" by simple definition? Also, chest-high Fighters. I just had to say that. I don't disagree with the concept of utilizing party members as cover, though I have to question whether or not a game could be well-balanced given the possibility. If you charge into the dragon's cave and you've got a tanking fighter decked out with fire-resistant gear and just have your wizards and chanters and priests stand behind them while they negate all of the dragon's fire breath (after all, those unfazed priests can casually heal what little damage is taken by the human shield/s,) you've got the makings for a pretty dull fight. Practically, that would be tactically sound, but "real" combat (i.e. the kind that doesn't involve dragons or healing magic, but does involve bleeding out in a foreign land despite the squad medic's best efforts,) isn't about the fun of the challenge, anyway.

Is this supposed to be armor? You were almost 3/3 until this showed.

As long as it's not an endangered species which is not an imminent threat, it's not done in a cruel fashion and it's not just for the sake of killing whatever's legal to kill (i.e. you're actually going to eat/use what you kill,) I don't see any problem. In fact, it should be encouraged with the prior qualifiers removed when dealing with invasive species (it would simply be oxymoronic to declare an invasive species an endangered species,) which are a threat to the native ecology. Do you have any pets? I think you should be able to guess where this is going. If ethics apply to the pot, why not the kettle? Besides, general human consensus is that animals can be killed "ethically" or "unethically," without regard for your opinion. Just because you weren't bothered by those chinese videos of women crushing live kittens' heads with high heels doesn't mean the majority of humans weren't. That's why there are laws against animal abuse, cruelty, neglect, hoarding and so on. Humans have already officially, systematically applied ethics to the management of the living and natural world, both for ethical and economical reasons.

edit: humor graph twisting pic removed for language

They're not streamlining it, they're doing the opposite: padding it with TV-original filler/changing entire storylines (Davos, for example,) making up new ones (Melisandre going to the BWB,) because one book per-season is too fast a pace compared to the rate at which GRRM has been writing. Instead of actually including content from the books that was omitted (e.g. Fist of the First Men.)

Was there anyone who really donated because of stretch goals? I didn't donate because of them, I donated because I wanted a cRPG from Obsidian. If that's the end result, that's all that matters.

A fat teenager is weaker than a 50 year old bodybuilder. A 50 year old can be less intelligent or wise than a teenager. Obviously, the point being that stereotypes revolving around age are pointless. They're stereotypes, not givens.

One of their stated goals since early in development was to stray from cliche D&D-type mechanics/concepts with a lot of the outlying classes.

But you need to protect her! By attaching random animal body parts to weapons!

I agree, small-minded nationalism is super relevant to the topic. "Now we can ignore a problem which the scientific community has reached a near-complete consensus on for another 50+ years!" Not to mention the fact that the US' primary trade relationship is with China, a country powered overwhelmingly by coal, a country whose rampant, if unequal, economic growth is leading to an emulation of capitalist materialism, further exacerbating the situation. The petty nationalism expressed by certain individuals is irrelevant to the issue of the thread. Maybe a red herring, maybe some kind of ill-thought "argument" that "If we have more oil, then it logically follows that climate change is a conspiracy by Big Science to [insert right-wing conspiracy theory here]! Also stop begging us to play world police, arabs! The US has never interfered with the internal politics and sovereignty of any foreign country, especially in the middle east, to further its own political goals and the economic goals of its most powerful individuals and corporations!"

That's not exactly a new concept. I've seen and played many games with non-standard dragon designs. Like or not, it seems to be more prevalent in Japanese games. Quickfire, recent example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIqgfTBXe_o

Probably because you haven't seriously listened to their reasoning, and if you have, did so without bringing a pre-existing bias, conscious or not. Even under the ancient concept of "an eye for an eye," such a penalty is unjustifiable as the planned crime/s were not actually committed. If a community is given leave to kill anyone who offends their moral sensibilities, that effectively gives them leave to kill anyone legally. Atrocious plans without successful atrocious action do not warrant capital punishment. Going to the steps you're suggesting goes beyond the concept of "rule of law," and strays closer to the territory of thought crimes. Furthermore, there roughly a thousand examples of wrongfully convicted people exonerated by such things as DNA evidence which was not technologically possible at the time of conviction who were saved from death by said evidence. If even one innocent person is put to death because the criminal justice system, who is the criminal then? The simple fact of the matter is, given the numbers, it's inevitable that a significant number of people have been executed in the US for crimes they didn't commit. Some of them must have been career criminals, some of them must have been fully innocent. That's the most fundamental problem of capital punishment. The US criminal justice system is severely flawed to begin with. Roughly two thirds of African American males have been incarcerated, but the president is an African American male. There is no genetic predisposition among African American males toward deviant behavior and criminality, the US system ignores the socio-economic root causes of crime in the name of economic liberalism, choosing to punish rather than prevent crime. That said, back to my original point: Opponents of the death penalty are opposed to it on general moral grounds. The basis for opposition to the death penalty is that one person's crime/s, no matter how despicable, does not give anyone else the moral or legal right to commit a crime (murder.) To kill someone who is an imminent threat is a different matter to executing someone who has already committed a crime and has been caught and convicted. Some base it on religious grounds, others on pacifist, still others on humanist grounds. Ignoring all that, pedophiles aren't exactly the most popular denizens of prison environments, to say the least.The culprit here is 40 years old and never successfully acted out his plans. With a 27 year sentence, he'll be 67 when he gets out, if he doesn't die in prison.

"The Jade Empire." As someone with Han family, I just couldn't help but laugh at such cheese. I wonder how much of that conception is derived from "sources" like the Bioware game or Mortal Kombat. They didn't "smack China," the US government makes these announcements yearly, at the very least. Espionage in all forms is a two-way street when it comes to real players on the international stage. Have you ever heard of Sun Tzu? "For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill."

Strictly speaking, it doesn't. It's budget that matters in that case. If they had enough money, they could voice every line. What has been mentioned by Obsidian is the issue of going back and revising content, which again is a budgetary, (as well as logistical,) issue related specifically to the cost of hiring actors and the potential issue of availability if they wanted to recod new lines.

...yeah, I'm not going to quote that excessive OP. At first glance, you seem to be presenting this from the perspective assumption that rain can only fall from 180 degrees behind the isometric camera's viewpoint. There is a thing called "wind," after all. The first screenshot is entirely plausible given the right wind conditions. Regardless, aren't you just complaining about bad visual effects from an old game? What basis do you have for suggesting that Obsidian is going to lazily go about constructing the game world? We've already seen a video demonstrating a day/night cycle, and the game's development is still, to my knowledge, pre-alpha stage. All the things you're stating about the value of weather effects to a game's atmosphere are givens, not secrets shamefully denied by the developers or skeletons in a closet you're dramatically unveiling to an unwitting public.

Source? For the record, I think 40k is a terrible setting, but the concept here is genuinely hilarious. "Features: multiple space marine romances to pursue!"

$3.00 was tempting, but even for that little... vikings are overdone and overrated. Never understood the popularity, especially now that there's some romantic history revisionist movement in Scandinavia to frame them in a positive light. But that's neither here nor there. The plot sounds suspiciously like God of War, but with Norse mythology as the basis.

I remember how twitter users were lauding Reddit en masse as heroes for "catching the bomber" when they fingered him. Just goes to show you can't take the word of any group of people who take pride in using their pretentious modifications to "lol" seriously. Boils down to the fact that the "amateur investigators on Reddit" are just amateurs in the end.

Of course, P:E isn't BG or NWN. The only way you're getting experience points is by completing quests, so I'd imagine whatever loot drops you get will be more valuable, since your opportunities for character growth are limited by the quests available at any given time. The primary driver behind completing quests is going to be the experience.

My thoughts exactly. Then P:E probably isn't for them. Well, I'm sure the creeps on a certain family of sites will come up with mods to rectify the situation, STATIM.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7xD1bVhCzI

A first person shooter with combat? What a travesty! So dumb. Like, what kind of neanderthal audience is a two-weapon limit for? There's more depth and tension in a system where you get 10 different weapons and large amounts of ammo for each of the 10 weapons which allow you to deal with every possible scenario in the ideal fashion. No Deus Ex style RPG options? Travesty. Bioshock totally had skill trees and perks and level ups, with stealth builds and melee builds. Bioshock Infinite is a total bait & switch, they took all the RPG elements from Bioshock and threw them out the... oh wait none of those RPG elements you're claiming were in Bioshock were actually in Bioshock. There were no RPG systems, there were no "builds." It was a first person shooter where 90% of the time you're shooting people with guns or plasmids.

You mean like grinding for better weapons and armor and keeping track of increasingly complex skill trees and spells? Why would so,e random respawning mook enemy be carrying the best gear in the game? That's not Obsidian's style. And skills and spells are things that are a constant part of the core gameplay. The game is combat-centric, by Obsidian's own account. It's not Skyrim or Minecraft. Stats, skills and spells are the foundation of the gameplay, not equivalent to some side item-collection/fetch quest thing. There's no alchemist class or blacksmith class. Crafting systems are fundamentally just padding to cover for lack of foresight when designing equipment and determining its availability/placement. You don't get to be a master smith, enchanter and elite warrior all at once unless you're playing a Bethesda game. And before you go spewing something about grinding for experience, that's not going to be possible in P:E, they've already confirmed experience is only awarded for quest completion, not for combat or other actions.