AGX-17

Got burned out on Borderlands 2. The bullet sponges in the new DLC are just obscene. Worse than Fallout 3's Broken Steel bullet sponges because they're actually a threat. So, 2nd Super Robot Wars OG. The Earth just got stolen (a plot from a game made in 2003, well before the Doctor Who revival, for any Whovians lurking about,) and moved to a universe that is completely empty but for eldtridch abominations that exist only in spirit and feed on negative emotion (of which much will be generated by the loss of the sun, moon, stars and the imminent freezing death of the Earth and all life upon it.) Obviously this is a plot that will be resolved with giant robots blowing things up.

I just want to say that augur (in this context is a noun, not a verb. That said, the best use for this I can see is "this dungeon is too high level for us."

If you want it to be immersive, your inventory should be a big sack full of crap piled up chaotically, and you should have to use your cursor to drag and drop/rummage through the bag to get what you want. Potions at the bottom of your bag should have their bottles broken by the weight and pointy ends of all the collected loot piled on top, with a soggy wet spot at the bottom with stamina, health and mana potions dripping off. After all, the earliest items you tend to acquire are potions, poultices and the like. If you have a lot of money you can buy a compartmentalized trunk which can hold only a small amount of gear which would act like a more traditional grid-style inventory, though without the grid, per se. Obviously you couldn't bring this into a dungeon unless you had some hulking beast of a man to carry it on his back. Example of a small one: Kind of late, but on the subject of Skyrim's UI, it was designed for consoles, as all Bethesda UIs have been since Oblivion (Todd Howard: "I LUUUUURV XBOX all our games are priority Xbox games from now on, and we'll port them to PC and PS3! Oh, about the PS3 thing... just kidding!"). And they were never good at UIs anyway. The Pip-Boy is probably going to be the highlight of their UI design career.

New game + modes are only really valid when you have multiple endings. The earliest instance I know of it is in Chrono Trigger, where the purpose was to allow you to find and achieve a plethora of new endings without the tedium of regular combat/levelling and to defeat enemies who would have been undefeatable in normal play. Honestly, I'd like to see a game (any game, not necessarily P:E,) where a New Game + type mode allows the player character to retain all memory and knowledge of the first playthrough, allowing them to dramatically alter events and discover/"create" an entire new storyline by altering or averting key events, as well as affecting interaction with NPCs and companions. Kind of Groundhog Day-ish, but without repeating the same day over and over until you get it "right" and become a better person, etc.

That's just plain good old-fashioned stupid. Not to mention moderately-highly sexist. "Females can't be paladins! Males can't be priests! Even though in the world's monotheistic religions for the past 1970ish years women were excluded from priesthood! Without exception!" Now, it's true that in the very early Christian church women could be religious leaders, but that was before the egalitarian teachings of Christ and books of the New Testament that reflected these things were banned by the Roman Empire to turn Christianity into another tool of power in place of the old gods of Greco-Roman belief. By the by, Amazon (well, Amazones to put it proper,) was the name given by the Greeks to a semi-mythical tribe/culture of central Eurasia (for which there is archaeological evidence in the form of burials of women which included weapons and armor, traditionally the burial trappings of a fighter, who is traditionally male.) Properly speaking, it refers to a specific cultural group, not a generic term for women warriors, who were exceedingly rare throughout history. In the history of Japan's samurai, only four female members of the Samurai caste/cass are recorded as having engaged in open warfare. While they were trained from youth in martial skills, it was more for self-defense/defense of family honor, they were still expected to just accept their arranged marriage and carry on the lineage as a mother/homemaker/proper Confucian bride subservient to her superiors (men.) And ignoring the fact that Obsidian has already stated there won't be binary Paragon/Renegade Good/Evil alignment scales (this new quoting function makes it impossible to add a quote after posting,) Osvir, Reputation =/= morality. If you slaughtered a band of slavers you would have a negative reputation with them. By your logic, exterminating slavers is evil, because negative reputation = evil.

There are a lot of ways to swing a sword, and a lot of bodily regions to put an arrow or a musket ball. I guess it wouldn't work in RTwP, but one of the best parts about Fallout was targetable body parts, which would work with some balance tweaks (I think it would work if there were no more eyeshot = massive damage and high chance of armor piercing criticals, both chances of head and eyeshots significantly lower for anyone but a Ranger.) Ok, I need to find a Ranger thread to propose this possibility of giving Rangers the option to target enemy body parts to stagger, cripple or do massive critical damage. Anyway, tangent aside, in melee combat it wouldn't really be feasible to have a bunch of different player attack animations and only one enemy death animation or vice versa. If your berserker just swung his battleaxe up the groin and should have split an enemy in half bottom-to-top, and the enemy stays intact and just falls over it's kind of immersion-breaking. By the same standard, if you have one axe swing animation and several different dismemberment animations for every enemy, it makes no sense for your vertical battleaxe falling on an enemy to cleave them horizontally at the waist. I don't see any real possibilities to magic having different animations except for different spells, and I see absolutely no possibilities for variation in enemy deaths by a single spell. Unless you've got targetable body parts.

What for? Extra mouths to feed that bring no utility to what has officially been stated to be a combat-centric game? Do you want to bugger them? Or to kill them? I don't recall anyone at Obsidian announcing that P:E would be a child-rearing simulation.

A. That's not my image. B. That's NOT A SHOVEL C. What is philosophical about any of this? What is this for? Why not Hammering Nails? Why not Joining Wood? Why not Plowing Fields? Fencing Pastures? None of this is quest related, as you said. You can just choose "plow," you know, wherever. Or "Join Wood." When you level up, will you choose to learn the Miter Joint or the Dovetail Joint? The possibilities are exhilarating. The entire point of buried treasure adventures is that you have to follow clues to discover the location, not literally dig up an entire country through a process of trial-and-error in the hopes that you'll find treasure.

Policy makers have always been part of the moneyed class.

Fallout Tactics Avernum Saga. Maybe Heroes 6 though not good as previous games. Also there is a new "indie" coming named Omerta: City of Gangster on gog.com. Seems like a nice game but gonna released end of this month. Fallout Tactics isn't an RPG. It's also not turn-based by default.

Realtime combat, blatant disregard for established canon/lore.

What, like you have 56k and run steam in offline mode? Or you think you have to play with others to get the benefits? Whatever, the game updates automatically, in-game. The last day was sniper rifles, of which I made off with many of superior quality for a rather low level character. Pitchford has said that they haven't raised the level cap because only about 17% of players have reached it. They've been sniggering and acting very smug about how they've got a super secret non-level cap boost to the level cap for a while now.

Huh. So basically, unless it is Path of Iron, we can expect percentile chances to be out the window. Percentile chances of what? Nobody at Obsidian has remotely clearly defined any skills that will be present in P:E or how they will function mechanically. The example was Sawyer's explanation/retort as to why players of NV couldn't shoot locks or blow up doors rather than pick the lock or find a key.

J.E. Sawyer has covered the broader concept on Formspring when people have complained about the inability to open locked doors or containers with explosives or gunfire in NV. His response was, to put it bluntly, that it would make the lockpicking skill worthless. Then the complainers counter that there could be a % chance of damaging/destroying the contents of a container. His response was that most players would just save-scum until they got everything fresh and new and undamaged. Just something to keep in mind when suggesting that charisma/persuasion skills in conversation should somehow translate into a charm/mind control spell in combat.

In general, the real appeal of zombies, especially in video games, is allowing the player/protagonist to engage in gratuitous, guilt-free violence.

Not to mention that they've taken to destroying the ancient architectural and cultural heritage of Timbuktu. It bears mentioning that this all started because of a military coup in Mali which overthrew the government, and the coup leaders believed that they were preventing this from happening by overthrowing the civilian government. Instead, they created the opportunity for Islamists to take over the country's north. To you sitting safe in the first world, yes. Not to the people whose towns they've occupied, not to the people they've killed, not to the people they've disfigured, mutilated and amputated.

It should be noted that the Pip-Boy in NV came directly from F3. It was entirely Bethesda's design. The only change to the PB UI in NV was the addition of challenges and reputation. Now if you'll excuse me, I need a shower. I feel dirty defending Bethesda game design.

English this, english that... You're not the center of the world, you know. The word "Paladin" has been applied long before the Arthurian legend. As I mentioned previously, David of Israel was considered the Paladin of the Weak. And it somehow makes more sense than the Round Table nonsense, because he clearly establishes a direct relationship with a God, granting him the necessary powers to hold such title. I see you do not understand the concept of an analogy. The modern RPG concept of a paladin originated in myths about Charlemagne's Paladins, which bear a striking resemblance to the Arthurian mythos which is Welsh Celtic in origin (and existed before the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain,) and spread far beyond the British isles in the middle ages. The tales of Arthur are not English this, or English that. Would that you'd study some history outside of your Bible. Paladin is not Greek or Hebrew. Who was it that called David "Paladin of the Weak"? Was this in the original Hebrew scriptures? The first Greek Christian scriptures? Paladin comes from middle French by way of the Italian "paladino" which itself descended from the Latin word "palatinus," meaning "Palace Official."

As long as the characters are well-written, what does it matter? I have no problem with some demigod deigning to help me in my noble quest. If such a character is present, there's generally no requirement that you keep them in your party (unless you're a hypocrite and always bring them to make the game easier while complaining about the very power that is carrying you through the game.)

Because they don't like fighting. If you go to work and hate your job, why do you go? Because you're rewarded with money, not "just because." Another subject that we've covered before, so I'll reiterate a position I took before: I think you should get experience for combat, but it should decline over time for each enemy of a given type/class/species that you defeat, which would be rather realistic. Eventually you would gain no experience for defeating an enemy. It simply doesn't make sense for combat not to result in experience, especially novel/new combat experiences. Initial combat encounters with a given enemy would provide substantial experience, but each following encounter/defeated individual of this enemy type would reward less experience, and this decrease in experience would accelerate until you eventually stop receiving experience, because you already "know" the best ways to fight and defeat/kill this creature. When combat is no longer something which provides rewards in terms of character growth, combat simply becomes an obstacle to the progress of the narrative for people who don't enjoy it but are interested in the story. Furthermore, if combat at a given point is too difficult for one such person, and no sidequests are available or there isn't enough sidequest experience available to level up, they're effectively stonewalled and locked out of the game. Assume for the sake of this hypothetical situation that they're already playing on the easiest difficulty. It's generally safe to assume that people who don't enjoy a given combat system are likely not proficient in it.

I said this before in a more-or-less the same subject thread, but I think character creation should be more about background than race (with backgrounds to choose from like Arcanum, but with a better game to be in, with maybe the option to customize a background,) and various attributes and skills should be modified by the chosen background (which would also, ideally, be reflected in the narrative to some degree, i.e. imagine if in New Vegas you could choose to be a former Enclave soldier/descendent or banished BoS member and you would get totally different relationships with Arcade and the Remnants or Veronica and BoS, respectively.) It admittedly makes some sense for different races to have different physical attributes, it's undeniable that say, an average Masai man living on the East African Savannah tends to be taller and lankier than, say, an average Taiwanese woman, but these shouldn't be as extreme/racist as they are in games like The Elder Scrolls ("black people, err... REDGUARDS are physically strong, and are well suited for manual labor due to their dull minds and great stamina,") so long as we're dealing with different "races" rather than different species. If a Godlike or Aumaua is a different species from a Human or a Dwarf then it's fine for them to go nuts with different base stats. Nobody can reasonably argue that it's speciesist to say that an Elephant is orders of magnitude stronger than a human, or that a human is orders of magnitude more intelligent than a squirrel.

Neither is the main character, so who precisely are we supposed to relate to? Oh okay But it's GRIMDARK and EDGY to prove the new DmC by a different, western developer is NEW and IMPROVED and DARKER and EDGIER. Like the Fox News level! SO EDGY. Hideki Kamiya will have ample opportunity to say gaijin on twitter soon enough.

That article was meant as a joke. The article is comedic commentary on the game's content. He didn't just make it all up, like he did Miguel for Fat Chicks in Party Hats. Don't expect this to improve. Expect it to get worse. Expect your "ruthless" reputed renegade Shepard to angst like a JRPG protagonist while everyone else says "Snap out of it Shepard! You have a Galaxy to save!"

It's normally Handsome Jack unless you've finished the main story, then it'll be Claptrap, as far as I'm aware. The Jack version is a lot better, yeah.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfLu7GRMR7g Also: ahahahahaha