AGX-17

You seem to be mistaking linear game design with linear narrative. Fallout 3 had a linear, railroad narrative. Just because you could accidentally stumble into a later station on the metaphorical rail-line didn't change the route. There was one story with one endgame (the "choices" tacked on at the end were just that; tacked on.) There's no room for player agency in a linear story. If you want a linear story sans player agency, there are plenty of JRPGs out there. Fallout wasn't a game about a strong narrative, it was a game about the world itself more than anything else. Few people would argue that "find the water chip" is an enthralling story hook, but a well-executed nonlinear story can be much better than a railroad surrounded by invisible walls and rubble heaps just as a well-executed linear story can be much better than an open-world nonlinear story. It's not a matter of "x is objectively better than y."

I don't find Honor to be all that useful, unless you're playing with the "Raging Barbarians" option on. The problem is that most of its benefits accrue towards the production/effectiveness of melee units. And a melee-heavy army is a decidedly sub-optimal choice. Ranged combat rules in this game-- it's the only way to damage an opponent while not taking any damage yourself. 4-5 Archers + your inherent city defenses can repel just about any early invasion force from a single AI. And if I'm planning on doing some offensive warring early in the game (absent an appropriate Unique Unit) I'm doing it with an army of 5+ Archers or Composite Bowmen (which are a G&K addition: an archer upgrade that unlocks at Construction) and as few as 2 Warriors to take cities and to keep enemy melee off of the archers. I find that I'm much better off taking the growth benefits of Tradition and leveraging that into a larger/earlier/more advanced army than I am spending culture on early Honor policies. In my experience, the 2 best windows for conquest in Civ V (with G&K) are Composite Bowmen, and Great War Bombers. (Again, assuming that you're playing a civ without a useful Unique Unit-- if you're China or England, for example, you're nuts if you're not facerolling some rivals with your Crossbow replacements.) 5 CBs and 1 Warrior can take out the capital of your nearest enemy most of the time. And it's not too difficult to get some GW Bombers into the air before your opponents have any actual air defenses, beyond maybe an easily-neutered Triplane or two. For at least half the game (I haven't bothered to quantify the time ratio between the pre-industrial and industrial/post game,) you're going to be dealing primarily with barbarians and occasionally hostile/militaristic civs who are geared toward just churning out military units as quickly and at as high a rate as possible, so it's at the very least worthwhile to take the basic one for the anti-barbarian bonus. I never go for the full Honor tree, but I still feel the barbarian combat bonus is a necessity. A barbarian brute hitting an archer or a composite bowman is going to come out on top in that fight unless the archer was a scout that got "promoted" by ancient ruins allowing them to ignore terrain movement penalties (which is terrible because it makes your former scout dramatically more vulnerable,) so it's necessary to have some melee units, and it works both ways. You have no choice but to defend yourself, because barbarians are guaranteed to throw themselves at your cities with no concern for their own lives. If you get spearman-rushed by some douche like Napoleon or Alexander circa 2000 BC,(which did happen to me the other day,) you're in deep if you've just got a half dozen archers to defend yourself. Simple attrition is how they win. An archer can only hit one enemy at a time, and if they've got 3-4 spearmen coming for each archer, they're el ****ed. Even if you have strong defenses in your cities, the sieges can last for a thousand or more years of game time (still an absolute absurdity about Civ combat,) and that's a lot of lost productivity and growth because you can't work tiles while under siege. Not to mention that those sorts of civs focus on the Honor tree so they get all manner of combat buffs and great generals while you might have, say, a couple of pyramids that helped you make tile improvements faster. Improvements which just got pillaged by those besieging troops for a quick heal in the middle of the siege. And they can and will use that +50% experience bonus to get instant heals to outpace the rate of damage dealt by the city. Even if they lose 4 out of 5 troops in the siege, a conquered city is still a conquered city. Plus that whole archer thing works both ways, they can surround that front line of melee attackers with a line of ranged attack units. CONCLUSION: Don't let yourself be caught off guard by a sudden declaration of war or barbarian horde. Yep. Even in real life, cultural genocide usually doesn't give you a great rep. It's not actually genocide unless you raze all their cities. ANYWAY Had a hilarious time in Dark Souls today, started a new character because I goofed up on Ornstein and Smough (killed Ornstein first, don't want manboobs' soul or armor,) and on the use of Quelaag's soul (made chaos blade instead of furysword,) got summoned by some newbie player for the Taurus demon, he got invaded, I backstabbed the douche with a +2 Drake Sword for what must have been 99% of his health and then he took a little fall off that trap stairway with the flaming barrel, landed on the ledge below and took 8 damage from the fall, which killed him.

@OP So what you're saying is that they should use things that have been standard in games since the mid/late-90s and which are practically a given already. Of course a "dark alley" is going to be "dark." They had things like torches and flashlights in games in the 90s. Ever heard of Thief? Hiding in shadows (and great AI with guards who aren't fooled if you just jump into a dark corner while in their vicinity/line of sight.) There are lighting modifiers to accuracy in classic cRPGs throughout the late 90s. The lower the amount of light, the lower the accuracy of characters when attacking targets in the dark, lower chance of detection if sneaking, etc. You might as well be saying "I am concerned with swords in the game. Let me start with a real world example, as I am sure this forum's users will not understand the concept. Swords are sharpened metal blades that deal bodily harm to creatures they strike which are not properly armored. I am concerned that swords will not function as weapons in this game, I hope Obsidian implements swordsin this fashion." Hell, just look at the latest update and ask yourself, "if they can and are implementing these visual elements, how could they fail to implement more technologically primitive concepts?" http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/63633-update-49-water-trees-daynight-lighting-all-that-jazz/?do=findComment&comment=1321978

..."That" region is also called the "breast" on males.

The good one. Also, suggesting Obsidian should make a video game of a manga/anime = AHAHAHA Also a laugh-worthy statement given the reality that Bethesda owns the Fallout IP and there's strong evidence Fallout 4 is in development at BGS.

They wouldn't likely be classified as feliform if they had a lot of canid traits. The taxonomy is pretty clear. Have you ever heard of convergent evolution? In this case, it's cosmetic. At any rate, a hyena would be better than a dog in a violent situation, objectively. It does bear mentioning that I'm bothered by the... zeal of the OP's dog-centered desire.

You're picking and choosing lower-tier result words to suit your position, neither of those comes up as the "best" match in GT. And as has been pointed out, more scholarly sources are even less cooperative.

The idea of just mindlessly or sadistically slaughtering every man, woman and child in the game world for ****s and giggles doesn't really fit in the realm of roleplaying games. Unless you're playing a sandbox or god game it's a rather absurd concept. If you really did do that in a proper RPG with a fleshed-out world full of factions and armies and large populations and so on, you'd unite massive armies against you against which you'd have no chance of success unless it was designed to make the player an undefeatable Mary Sue, like Oblivion or Skyrim. Why can't you use Skyrim or GTA to play out your sociopathic fantasies and let the rest of us enjoy a quality RPG? I think garbage like the Postal games are more up your alley.

Yeah, the heroes like Bobby Kotick at Activision have been pushing for gameplay and are clamoring for old school type games for years, but those damned developers have so much money and so much power that he can't stop them from focusing on graphics and rehashes over gameplay. It's because of those corporate fatcats that Call of Duty is what it is today. Poor Bobby, he's the hero of gaming industry. And what about the guys at EA? They're on OUR side, protecting us from the greed and malice of developers. Publishers are price takers, not price makers, dammit! And now the greedy, stinking developers have resorted to cheating the Publishers by using that vile new Kickstarter conspiracy to cheat publishers out of their rightfully earned profits and to keep fresh new ideas out of the video game industry. Kickstarter is where new AAA-graphicswhore mindless shooters come from, innovative indie games have always come from the biggest publishers and their focus groups, not those lousy basement-dwelling developers. I'm with you, Cultist, we have to boycott these criminals like inxile and obsidian for conspiring against creativity! After all, the true artists are the MBAs, not those lousy developers.

The UIs in the old IE games were a mess. No offense, developers of old IE games. But they were. I don't care about left click vs. right click since in this day and age such a thing should be customizable in the options. It's kind of a bit difficult to do that for the mouse buttons because in the IE games they had multiple functions. No it isn't. The multiple functions of M1 become the multiple functions of M2 and vice versa if you switch them. Or M3, M4, M5, etc. if you want. Keymapping in the options is not a complex technical hurdle that requires a quarter of the budget and months of dedicated programming, much less the physical impossibility you seem to believe it to be. Have you ever even tried rebinding controls in a game? It's a rare game that doesn't allow you to do so.

A dog would make a good distraction. You know, like a consumable item, deploy it once and then it distracts the enemy by getting killed by them. Hyenas aren't dogs. They're not even caniform. They're actually part of the suborder feliformia. In other words, Hyenas are closer to cats than dogs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feliformia

For someone who knows so much about the inner workings of The Evil Empire and its homogeneous, unthinking drones who are absolutely devoted to The Cause, how is it you haven't ever seen a single American celebrity gossip magazine, sports magazine, or beer commercial, or reality TV show? Have you ever heard of "mardi gras," "college" or "spring break"? It would appear not. Or rather, you would normally use those as an insult about americans' intelligence or values in another thread, but so long as an american says "right" you've got no alternative but to say "left," no?

Dark Souls. Not looking forward to the hike I'm going to have to go on in Darkroot Garden to retrieve all the humanity and souls that bitch (come on, it's technically accurate, right?) Sif cost me. That is definitely a co-op boss fight. Made the Chaos Blade in Anor Londo. Unfortunately it was not the intended action, but at least it ought to tip the balance when getting invaded. Civ V's AI is opportunistic. An aggressive opponent (which both the Mongols and English are) will invade you if it thinks it can win. (There's a behind-the-scenes military-strength calculation that it uses to make this decision.) If you're getting dogpiled early by surrounding civilizations, it's probably because they think you're easy pickings. Build more military. The "warmongering menace" penalty seems to depend heavily on whether you lauched a surprise attack, or whether you eliminated another Civ. If you want to attack somebody and don't want to get too bad a reputation for it, Denounce them first and be generally hostile to them in diplomacy. And the Civ-elimination penalty is rather severe-- it's often better to leave a rival in possession of its crappiest city than it is to eliminate them entirely. I've been labeled a "warmongering menace" for fulfilling my end of a defensive pact, even after the player the pact was made with was already at war. But yeah, don't focus on things like wonder-whoring unless you've got a wide berth or an entire landmass all to yourself. Taking the early Honor policies is, (depending on your gameplay preferences,) unfortunately, a must for self-defense. Some civs will play dirty and ask for friendship declarations so they can leech resources from you before attacking, too (the Ottomans are really big on this in my experience.) There should be some kind of "backstabber" reputation (that never expires,) for civs that do that, but there isn't. Tangential, but I don't know what they were thinking when they decided that the Celts would be the "maximize faith income" Civ for G&K.

She would wrap bandage around her torso, and then be able to fit into male armor. Nope. Ignoring the fact that different people have different bodily proportions from one another and assuming that all women have identical builds and all men have identical builds, a woman would not be able to wear armor designed for a man comfortably or effectively, if at all, and vice versa. One size does not fit all. Shadowmant is starting from the fallacious assumption that the female torso is simply a male torso with breasts. It's quite far from the "bikini armor" end of the scale. If you hid the head it would still be a plausible assumption that the character is male based on the armor design alone. Hide the head and ignore the stance (or assume that homosexual men in the P:E world come in the "flaming gay" variety,) and it would look like male armor whose breastplate doesn't extend far enough to protect the soft abdominal region effectively.

No necromancers or anthropomorphic animals.

There's been a terrain effect thread before. Obsidian has said nothing about terrain. The classic IE "MISS, MISS, MISS, MISS, CRITICAL MISS, MISS, MISS, MISS" experience was thanks to the D20 system.

To the OP (obviously): So essentially you're saying that P:E should add a bunch of cosmetic items purchasable with real money because that will 100% convert pirates into paying customers? The practice sounds like the F2P/microtransaction model and the intent sounds like EA DLC (pay $5 to change the cosmetic appearance of a character in a single-player game.) Also, why'd you post an image with a paragraph of unreadable text on the bottom?

If you've looked at the update which included preliminary head models for dwarves, you'd see that there's a logical inconsistency with that high a level of geometric detail and the presumption that the game will never leave the standard isometric view.

It's an issue of broad cultural sexism, not political correctness. Yeah, I get it, you've never taken a Women's Studies class in your life and you never will, because you completely understand the female experience both now and in the past as if you were a woman yourself, there's no rape culture, etc. Whatever, here's the study that found any comment made about a female political candidate's appearance negatively affects her standing: http://wmc.3cdn.net/63fa94f234fe3bb7eb_g4m6ibsyr.pdf

Because they were killed by Comstock, and instead transcended time and space to become transcendent quantum existences (kind of like the Tralfamadorians from Slaughterhouse Five, pay attention to what they say at the graveyard.) Again, it's not that there was one universe in the beginning, until Booker DeWitt got baptized, and then there were two, it's that there were always infinite parallel realities as is often suggested by cosmologists (hence the "infinite.") As has been stated (I think,) the game's story fundamentally stems from Robert Lutece's desire to fix the problem he and Rosalind created when they helped Comstock take Anna. ...Only if you follow the post-mercantilist Protestant/Evangelical "interpretation" of the New Testament. Which is more of a corrupt justification for personal greed than a legitimate interpretation of the camel and the eye of the needle. I don't know of any Biblical passage where Jesus tells lepers to take "personal responsibility" for being poor lepers, but I do recall him curing them of their leprosy and asking nothing in return. Also there was that whole "dying for everyone's sins" thing, where he absolved everyone of their sins. Funny how an economic system (Capitalism,) was so easily able to corrupt a religion and its values like that. Says a lot about human nature. ...How does saving Booker make her a damsel in distress? She's the one who saves Booker almost all the time. No. Something tells me I don't want to. And it has told me a lot about you. What's wrong with existentialism? You'd prefer a story written more in the vein of Gertrude Stein?

There's never been any evidence of such a puzzle being present in P:E, so I don't see what reason there is for concern. Hell, have they even said there would be puzzles in P:E? Sounds like Dragon Age 2 is right up your alley.

No, most of us understand that you have an irrational fear of an unrealistic development. As you haven't played a game that hasn't even been made yet, who are you to declare that P:E is "coherent, authentic and believable"? There's no rational, logical, evidentiary basis for belief in the concept of a soul or magic in reality, so what makes P:E more believable than any/every other fantasy setting? The P:E setting is still plenty full of fantasy tropes from what I've seen, the term "fantasy setting" is a trope in itself. There is a 0% chance that P:E will be 100% original and devoid of Tolkien or D&D influences. The only issue with fantasy games is whether or not they're well-executed, because at this point, anybody with an expectation of a Tolkien/D&D-free fantasy setting is just begging for disappointment. It's the technological differences that make P:E more appealing. Everyone knows the 1247 A.D. version of Fantasy RPG already. Also, please point out which development update/dev post on the forums suggested to you that P:E is going to be steampunk, cyberpunk, etc., or stop insisting that it's an imminent threat to all you hold dear (which is, at this point, essentially a pre-alpha game build about which you know barely anything.)

I'm going to edit my post to make it more clear. I am aware of the current level of technology. Hence the Project Eternity 3 in the topic : I'm talking about future development of the franchise. Since when was it a franchise? They haven't even made or officially named the game yet. Besides which, what's your basis for panicking over a nonexistent threat? Baldur's Gate II didn't take place in a gritty urban Shadowrun-style environment. This is Obsidian, not Activision, even if they did advance to an industrial revolution setting in a sequel it would almost inevitably be well done if Obsidian's staff remained more or less the same. They sure as hell couldn't come up with anything worse than Arcanum. The industrial revolution was started by multiple factors, a number of which predated the earliest industrial use of steam power, i.e. economy of scale/mass production and the emergent economic system of capitalism (see An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776.) Water power was the initial power source of the industrial revolution. Steam power was a great magnifier of power, but it wasn't "The Culprit." Technological advancement is an ongoing process, like evolution, not a series of fixed points. Many of the technologies that are recognized as revolutionizing a given era were often invented "before their time" by forgotten geniuses, i.e. 19th century Britain's Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. The practical applications of steam power for locomotion were overlooked for decades after the invention of the first steam locomotive.

You've just twisted everything I said to suit your own position without addressing anything legitimately. Comstock isn't the only possible result of Booker DeWitt in any form of leadership role. You're deliberately ignoring the Vox Populi DeWitt, you're deliberately ignoring the infinite parallel worlds aspect (infinite possibilities means every possibility is true, i.e. there are infinite worlds where DeWitt is the Progressive Party president of the U.S., there are infinite worlds in which he doesn't exist, committed suicide, never sold Anna, never joined the army, was never at Peking or Wounded Knee, was a mild-mannered tailor, etc.,) you're deliberately ignoring the fact that I was specifically referring to false dilemmas. I didn't say BI should/must be non-linear, I never suggested it was sold/advertised as "C&C," I said it shouldn't disingenuously present "choices" when there are no significant effects or results. Unless you count receiving a free pair of pants as a significant moment of player agency in a video game narrative. You also don't seem to understand the meaning of the word "ostensible," or variations thereof.

Her hardline stance singlehandedly extended the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland for over 10 years (a generation of IRA members joined up because of her, according to a number of BBC commentators, reporters, and former IRA members themselves,) she destroyed the British coal industry, she was a passionate backer of big business special interests, her Hayekian economic policies put the British economy into a recession that would have seen her ousted after her first term were it not for the Falklands War, etc. I guess it may be too late now, but if you'd listened to the BBC's coverage and retrospective on her life, you'd have gotten a longer laundry list of reasons why "x" populace or faction despised her.