AGX-17

You just said that "not everyone's cut out to be a leader who makes great changes." Then what is Comstock? If "DeWitt is not the one that should be making them," then why shouldn't the player be making them? Booker is proof that Booker is capable of making decisions. The Booker you play is one who didn't become Comstock, one who obviously made a different choice from "Comstock" at a critical juncture. It's a matter of the designers presenting you with false "choices" whose only purpose is to give an appearance of player agency when, in fact, it's a linear shooter in the fashion of Half-Life 2 or CoD. It's a great game, but aside from adding to the narrative a little in one or two instances (like the coin toss,) the choices have no true relevance. Getting rewarded with a pair of pants for choosing to throw the ball at Fink is nonsense, the scenario plays out the same way no matter what choice is made, and Booker's intentions are unknowable unless they're psychic. And Slate exists just to extend the length of the game. The Hall of Heroes would have had the same expository value without him, and anything that happens to Slate is irrelevant once you've started walking through tears into parallel worlds where people you've killed are simultaneously alive and dead. Besides which, that's the last you ever hear of that Slate. Then you hear about a Slate who's a member of the Vox Populi, and a Booker who made different choices and ended up dying a Martyr for the Vox. Just like in that text parody, it's full of "But thou must!" moments. Not 5 minutes before the raffle part, you receive a telegram from "R. Lutece" specifically instructing Booker not to make his presence known, and "DON'T PICK #77 STOP" is easily memorable by players, who are ostensibly Booker, but the game makes you take a ball (#77 at that,) regardless. They might have intended it as some kind of "fatalism," but the end result just looks like poor game design, because presenting something as player agency makes players think they're getting some kind of agency. Bioshock was ostensibly all about choices (not well-executed,) yes it's "cute" and "subversive" to make BI a game where choices don't matter (outside of combat,) but it's pointlessly misleading to add a rarely-used "choose one or the other or make no choice" mechanic that adds nothing more to the experience than a pair of pants for Booker and a cosmetic difference to Elizabeth's appearance.

Hilarious "text adventure" satire of the game, spoilers, obviously, but pretty dead-on about the negative (false choices, illusion of player agency where there is none,) and trite (shoot & loot) aspects of the game reviewers have tended to overlook. Most telling line: "You jump out and hook onto the rail thing that I didn't mention earlier. It's literally a rail shooter, clever!" http://crypticsea.com/twined/bioshoot1.html# Also multiple uses of "Put a bird on it!" = +1 in my book.

Different characters should be just that.

I'd imagine it has something to do with the rather closed "community" of "hardcore gamers" being generally hostile toward females, dismissing them as "casuals" or "fake geek girls."

Dragon Age doesn't have multiple forms of currency. Dragon Age's currency is analogous to dollars and cents. Silver and copper coins are smaller denominations of the same form of currency in it. Gold is the hundreds column, silver is the tens column and copper is the ones column, in mathematical terms. Multiple forms of currency is like New Vegas with bottlecaps, NCR dollars, and Legion Denarii. Gold, silver and copper or bronze coinage have been standard for most of the history of civilization. It's simple economics. Silver in reality, and typically in fantasy, is less valuable than gold, ergo, you need several silver coins to equal the value of one gold coin. Unless you'd prefer to go back to bartering, in which you have 30 stoat pelts that you want to trade with a seafaring trader for 14 barrels of salt that you'll offer to the vintner in exchange for 6 casks of wine, which is what the blacksmith will accept in exchange for that spiffy new set of armor you want. See what's going on there? In bartering, there's no set universal value to any good or service, it depends on the personal needs and wants of the parties involved, as well as what they have access to.

https://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&q=ranger&tbs=dfn:1&tbo=u&sa=X&ei=6Z9gUcu3N6ayigLqgYGwDA&sqi=2&ved=0CC8QkQ4&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&fp=494c9f1b679e21a3&biw=1440&bih=775 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Ranger_Division http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Rangers http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ranger "rang·er noun \ˈrān-jər\ 1 a : the keeper of a British royal park or forest 2 : one that ranges 3 a : one of a body of organized armed men who range over a region especially to enforce the law b : a soldier specially trained in close-range fighting and in raiding tactics "range verb transitive verb a :to rove over or through b :to sail or pass along intransitive verb 1 a :to roam at large or freely b to move over an area so as to explore it" Aside from park rangers, there's no history of "ranger" referring to some elfin "defender of nature" who summons bears to stop people from eating animals that bears naturally would eat (that's PETA-level stupidity.) It's a fundamentally flawed concept in D&D, but "hunter" isn't much better. A hunter is someone who hunts, hunters in a medieval-ish setting hunt for sustenance or profit or both (taking pleasure in the act is peripheral, unless you're a noble, in which case you probably have hundreds of men and dogs to help you kill a few foxes and maybe a boar or two.) Ancient people hunted with spears and traps before bows existed, and continue to use traps to this day. When ancient people hunted mammoths they formed large groups and stabbed the things to death with their spears, they didn't use bows and arrows, even if they had a bow and arrows it would be useless for hunting large game. People used firearms for hunting at least as far back as the 18th century, too. Since there are firearms in P:E, why wouldn't a "hunter" use firearms? That would be a much more effective way of taking down any prey. Now, it's true that human hunters have long relied on dogs, or more rarely, birds of prey to aid them in the process, so the only detail we know about the Ranger class has some veracity unless we're talking about bear-mounted archers. The idea of a "ranger" in the vein of a "wanderer" or "scout" is what appeals to me the most.

Well there's your problem (in bold.) It's not an escort mission, though. Elizabeth is invincible and is constantly teleporting around so as not to be in your way (and often leading the way ahead of you, which was almost certainly intentional,) and constantly keeps you supplied with whatever you need at the moment. Low on health? Health kit! Low on salts? Salts bottle! Low on ammo? Ammo for your low-ammo weapon! She even "summons" useful geography and allies from other universes on command! The defining aspect of an escort mission is that the player must protect a vulnerable, underpowered/useless NPC from point A to point B. Elizabeth is closer to an RPG companion/party member than the subject of an escort mission. The mission can't even fail because as long as she's around she revives the player/Booker from death/near death.

May I ask why? Didn't want to spend money on an operating system that had no tangible benefits until now. And at this point, I pretty much have to buy a whole new PC to go with it. So there's that. But the tangible benefit since about 2006-07 has been being able to play new games on a PC.

It's hard to qualify the ending as having a "message," it's not like Art Student Hitler's going to play it, jump into his time machine and kill himself to prevent Genocidal Dictator Hitler from becoming a reality after playing it (obviously there are infinite parallel worlds where Hitler can play Bioshock Infinite.) In the end, it's really just standard video game railroading. After all, it's an FPS, not an RPG.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3506352&userid=17931&perpage=40&pagenumber=7#post410868395 All classes can use all weapons (without a penalty I assume) If you want to specialize the options will be thematic, so you have a bunch of different weapons to choose from / switch between where you get your specialization bonus. Your post didn't actually cover half the concepts referenced. Your post also didn't link to a list of Sawyer's Something Awful posts on the subject, either. You say "ignore" but you really mean "provided no precognitive links to a list of Sawyer's SA forum posts clarifying the matter in question in order to prevent a prophesied post from being made."

Disney owns KotoRII now. Fans already fixed bugs/restored unfinished content with an (unoffically) Obsidian-approved patch.

I think there ought to be a distinction between weapon type/class and fighting style/technique. Not saying that you should be able to dual wield greatswords, but that, for example, dual-wielding should be an option for certain weapons, and mastery of those weapons ought to synergize with the fighting style in question. Meaning using the character's chosen weapon type with their chosen fighting style should result in greater raw efficacy than if they were dual wielding significantly more powerful enchanted weapons of a different class in which they aren't specialized. i.e. You've got two base steel Seaxes and a +5 fire enchanted, armor piercing longsword (in which you haven't specialized,) using the two base, unenchanted weapons would yield a generally superior combat performance (unless you're fighting some sort of ice golem with extremely high DT and a severe weakness to fire.)

Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, Sam & Max, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Jedi Knight? Come on. 0/10 trolling right there.

As Sawyer has said, the game's primary focus is the combat aspect, so whether or not its replayability is "robust" is going to depend on how much (or little,) you enjoy the combat. That said, I do prefer that some amount of content should be inaccessible to certain character classes, builds or reputations as an incentive for replaying the game in a different way.

It would not be difficult to have RGB customization. If you could do it with your UI menus in a JPRG in the mid 90s there's no reason you couldn't in a PC game in 2014.

Once you go Sandman you don't go back. Ancient Greek. κωμικός (komikos "relating to comedy".) Of course, it's not up to any individual to dictate the evolution (and remember, evolution is not a "race to the top," as many mistakenly believe, evolution is simply change over a long span of time,) of any language. Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, the English language actually originated in Europe, (in a region on the island of Britain known as "England,") a pidgin of various Mediterranean, Germanic, Nordic and other Indo-European sources. Fun Fact: English is the dominant language in the US because of long-term successes by English colonial interests in the 17th and 18th centuries!

Discussing legitimate issues from legitimate sources (oh wait, The Atlantic is American,) doesn't quite fit obyknven's MO. Are we sure this is really him? I mean, yeah, there are some token Russian nationalist statements tossed in, but this doesn't go far enough. And sure, he's implying that Russia is totally going to give Nigeria a bunch of nukes and they'll totally nuke America and win (as we all know, there are no poor or disenfranchised people in "The West," everyone here is a rich government-corporate imperialist who deserves nothing but nuclear death, especially those fiends at Obsidian Entertainment, who contribute nothing to the world but fantasy tripe to serve the imperialist-capitalist war machine's desire for entertainment, doing nothing to make the world a better place,) but it really doesn't have that je ne sais quoit...

"I hated ghosts in Fallout 2. It wasn't my idea." best thing he said in the Arcanum videos to date.

The reason why I said I need to check Comstock's hand is because Anyway, taking a quick jaunt back into Borderlands 2 now that the level cap has been boosted. Can't say I'm thrilled by even more bullet-spongier enemies, but maybe if I make it to lv 61 in UTVHM I can finally solo those raid bosses from TVHM. And then Gearbox will probably make it so those raid bosses only drop legendary or unique loot in UTVHM like they did before with TVHM.

I would call it just good old fashioned "stupid fun," but supporting violent criminal cartels and rebel groups in an attempt to bring about a coup in a foreign country was the real CIA's MO for the duration of the Cold War, so it's surprisingly realistic on that level. Even if players don't notice because they're busy dragging civilians to 50,000 feet attached to a fighter jet before cutting the cable and watching them plummet while cackling maniacally. Haven't played it, but Dig-Dug is about popping all the enemies with a bicycle pump within the time limit, not the digging itself.

How would a massive book with a bayonet attached be anything but comically cumbersome and ineffective? Concept 1: Yes, in a sense. What I meant really was a blade that requires the Wizard to be in proximity to the Grimoire. So it is still very much close-combat. But like a Jedi with his Lightsaber could do a "Force throw" as well. Concept 3: Haven't painted it yet but I thought of one more which is practically a combination of Concept 1 & Concept 2. The Wizard could perhaps open a rift behind an enemy, and stick his sword into the book and hit the enemy from far away like that. Oh I dunno I would have to draw this to show what I mean I think. Fighters can't typically (or ever, to my knowledge,) throw their sword at an enemy like a modern toy boomerang that returns on command. Conjuring a spectral sword of some kind is not analogous to a wizard equipping a sword and plate armor. And why would the wizard in question drop their treasured grimoire (it has been established that the things are the crux of magic usage in the P:E world,) on the ground in the first place? By the by, I don't think we need any more "visual aids." I do believe it's reasonable to assume most readers are familiar with the concept of portals, dimension doors, wormholes and the like.

And all other areas, that are on the crit path, will scale by level? Well.. Could I suggest a gameplay mode that eliminates all level scaling? My line of reasoning is as follows. -Trial of iron mode (confirmed): *will indubitably be used by a small portion of players (die once - game over) *can be self-regulated by actually... starting a new game when your party gets wiped out -No level scaling mode (not confirmed): *would be appreciated by a much larger portion of players, I'd wager *cannot be self-regulated Level scaling, as abhorrent as it is when applied universally, can be necessary at times, especially in non-linear games. Without some amount of level-scaling, a non-linear game becomes a practically linear game by way of making some ostensibly doable areas too difficult for players of a given level to complete.

Yeah, all you'd need are RGB sliders. Then you could change them to match the color of the terrain you're fighting on! Gray stone surface? Gray circles for player and enemy alike!

You mean an IGN forum user is asking.

Replaying B:I, noticing a lot of stuff that gains a great deal of significance once you know the story. Obviously you know who the people in the boat are, and the fact that they're debating a "thought experiment" takes on new significance. So does the line about "the universe doesn't seem to like its peas mixed with its porridge." Have to check Comstock's hand. The game has a bigger sense of urgency with that goal in mind. Also have been farming large and green titanite shards from slime enemies in the Depths in Dark Souls, just because. I need to upgraaaade.