AGX-17

Yeah, that sure does sound Tolkienesque. I remember that one time when the Orcs called in an orbital bombardment at Helm's Deep. So cliche. And Baldur's Gate with all its cyborgs and nanotechnology. Man, the mindhacking minigame in BG2 was the worst part of it. Which attribute do you need to max out to keep these guys from noticing you're physically rewiring their neurons to create false memories?

How is trial-and-error guessing from a list of options different from trial-and-error guessing from a series of letters or syllables? How is it metagaming?

I'd prefer P:E to have original, well-written antagonists rather than fanfiction ripoffs of existing characters. You don't really understand how societies work, huh? Feminism has existed for decades, why is misogyny still rampant? Why do women earn 70 cents for every dollar a man earns? Nationalism and nationalist sentiment are alive and well in many countries (the US, most former Soviet states, Russia especially, the Balkan states, China, etc.) The US tried to literally fight communism in Vietnam. How did that turn out? The Civil Rights movement in the US "succeeded," why are african americans still at the bottom of the metaphorical pecking order? Why are black males the largest prison population in the US? And all of these concepts are abstract, relativistic concepts. Nationalists believe they're right and their country is better than everyone else's and should be in charge. Racists believe their race is superior to others, and they believe that the idea of equality or tolerance is a harmful philosophy/ideology that has entrenched itself into their society. These things aren't "malevolent Powers" that you can just beat up with a sword and magic missiles until suddenly everyone's ideas and ideals change as the "malevolent power" is defeated.

Last I heard, P:E wasn't a text-adventure ZORK revival. "What is the color of the sky?" "blue" "invalid response" "Blue" "invalid response" "Blue." "invalid response" "Sky blue." "invalid response" "Sky Blue." "You may pass."

No-good do-gooder, in the cartoon villain cursing sort of way. Altruism for altruism's sake (also to spite certain sectors that despise altruistic players.) Well, it'll depend on race and class, really. Which part of the big picture does Renegade Shepard keep in mind when violently assaulting people without cause and issuing gun-to-the-head death threats to his/her own team if they start showing signs of Paragon infection (re: Jack loyalty mission in ME2)?

I assume this is the right section for this, so... http://gizmodo.com/5...free-right-here And despite what some of the Gizmodo comments say, it is legit and everything is in working order.

Watch Two Best Friends play Lollipop Chainsaw and you'll get all you need to know. I'd link it but I think I'd probably get banned because the game's content violates several of the ironic rules of the board.

Well, it was the Republican congress in the 90s that came up with Obamacare as a response to the Clinton administration's attempts to pursue universal healthcare or at least healthcare reform. Newt Gingrich loved Obamacare back when it was his idea. Incidentially, the article is by a libertarian think-tank employee so I'm not quite convinced of skyrocketing premiums.

They've shifted their fanbase from people who like cRPGs to people who like cRPG lite on the side of their romantic companionship gaming. The real lesson they've learned is that open world/sandbox games are a big thing now, which is why they announced DA3 would be an open world game. Admittedly, that could be a legitimate response to the many legitimate complaints about the severely limited environment and geography of DA2.

Both of the polls' bottom/no options state that the player should have no control over their followers. The most control offered is Persona 3-style "tactics," (a notoriously bad system which received such a negative response that the developers added full party control to the PSP remake,) the poll itself blatantly states a design in which players have no control over their companion characters in or out of combat. It doesn't say "no, I want the option to let them do their own thing," (something you can already do in cRPGs,) it says How is that not a clear statement that "I do not want there to be any option for any player to control their party in this game"? And it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out the one voter in favor of that is you. The entire point of an RPG is player agency. Companion characters are Non-Player Characters. Those characters' personalities, histories, intentions and expressions are done through written dialogue and the narrative crafted by the writers, not by AI actions in combat. A game is still a game, and all the games of the cRPG genre P:E is a revival of/homage to gave players agency over their companions in combat, both as necessity and as an element of the story. These characters have implicitly agreed to "follow" the player. They didn't agree to join an anarchist commune in which every character is free to do whatever they like. Your ad hominem attacks and poor grammar (I didn't say he insisted on forcing ME on anything,) surely prove your superior position, mighty white knight of the internet. And they prove your calm heart and rational mind. Unlike you, I simply addressed the poll and its implications, I didn't make ad hominem attacks or behave like a "raging butthurt hardcore gamer redneck." And by all means, the continued use of insults and name-calling will surely prove you right in the end.

Android is a smartphone OS. You readily admit that the only thing smartphone about Ouya is the OS. Ergo, it's a smartphone with all the smartphone capabilities removed save gaming apps. Like I said, that does not put it in the same league as consoles or gaming PCs. It makes it a suped-up smartphone (without the smartphone capabilities) meant for playing smartphone games on a TV. Another dry year. Really? This list is ludicrously long. Wasteland 2 is there. Is this because there are no JRPGs for PC?

So you think that because you personally don't like to have control over companion tactics and actions, everyone else should be denied that option? You come into a cRPG with the wrong expectations, and every time you're surprised when your incorrect expectation is shattered? Why are you even interested in P:E then? And why do you think your personal opinion should be forced on all other players? The vast majority of which would prefer the established/advertised purpose of RTwP combat, to allow you to manage your companions' actions stress-free. Even worse, you'd like us to have no control over how our party members level up? There are not going to be "powerful AIs," there's going to be "AI designed to be functional in a game whose developers expect the players to be actively issuing commands to their followers in combat." Obsidian is a game developer, not an AI R&D lab on the campus of MIT. It took a supercomputer built specifically to play chess and ONLY play chess to beat a human in chess. Why are you interested in P:E when you clearly don't even like the basic combat mechanics which form the meat of the classic cRPGs it's succeeding? It sounds like you're more interested in a plays-itself hand-holding casual experience than the classic cRPG experience P:E is meant to give us.

PhysX is a proprietary hardware technology of nVidia. That's the fundamental difference between PhysX and, say, Havok (the physics simulation used in games like HL2 and Bethesda's Gamebryo games. No mystery as to why it works well in HL2 and poorly in Fallout 3.) PhysX support in the engine doesn't mean PhysX can be used. You have to have a PhysX enabled nVidia GPU for it to be applicable. I have an nVidia card with PhysX, so I can enable it in games that support it. In Borderlands 2, for example, what it does is add boatloads of particulate debris from explosions and bullet impacts (excessive amounts, to be honest, it doesn't slow my game down, but it looks stupid for a single little bullet decal to produce 50x its volume in rocks and concrete chunks,) and realistic physics to fabrics (almost exclusively restricted to tarps and banners and the like,) which get knocked out of the way when you pass through a doorway covered by a sheet or you'll punch a hole through a tarp suspended over an area if you jump on it instead of it being a solid object you can stand on. You can also shoot the things to shreds, or just shoot one side and the rest of it will droop off to the other side. Finally, it adds fluid dynamics that look bad even on the highest and most performance intensive PhysX setting (basically it replaces a lot of static fluid particle effects and meshes with what are essentially giant droplets of water, corrosive-aftermath goo or outhouse sludge that slide around as if they were on an extremely smooth surface.) But that's about it. If that's all that one of the biggest FPS'/games of the year could think to do with PhysX it's hard to imagine any worthwhile use for it in P:E. It's a technology that has a long way to go before we have flowing rivers of individual water molecules. And to reiterate: you need an nVidia card with PhysX capabilities to utilize it. Lighting dynamics are different from realtime particle/newtonian physics effects. Unless P:E has a day/night cycle it's unlikely to have realtime global dynamic lighting.

The JRPG Tales of Destiny revolved around the concept. There was also a "Sword Familiar" in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Nothing psychotic or evil going on in either case. Okay. I don't doubt but that you could make an entire CRPG centered around an intelligent weapon, perhaps with it serving as your Avatar. It might even get to be fun after a while being a talking symbiotic sword. That's... not what the idea was behind ToD.

This is more what I meant--have some that are just random "five wolves attack" and have others which are crafted. The random element would be in precisely when/where they show up, not necessarily all the aspects of the encounter. Which is essentially the same thing as special encounters in the original Fallout games (obviously Tactics and BoS don't count. Obviously.)

What, exactly, am I supposed to be seeing here?

Wow, you're totally the first person to make that controversial opinion known. At least it's honest. *directly implicating your dishonesty in starting this thread* Regardless, that doesn't make it not fun.

It's not new. It's Damage Threshold, just like in New Vegas and Fallout 1 & 2 (although it was coupled with Damage Resistance in F1&2.) The crushing, piercing or slashing thing isn't new, either. It was a staple of the old IE games, I've even seen it done in JRPGs. A longsword was designed to do both piercing and slashing damage. That's why the end with a tapered point, not a flat box. Which isn't really relevant, anyway, because even weapons typically accepted as "just a slashing weapon" could do piercing damage just as well. e.g. ....That makes no sense whatsoever. An arrow shot by a bow does piercing damage. That's the entire point of it, no pun intended. Slashing damage might be done by certain types of arrowheads when they're extracted. If you went into battle in the middle ages with steel chainmail on, you'd still carry a shield for fear of archers. And there were many types of arrow heads designed for different uses. A broadhead with sharp/serrated edges would be used for hunting or unarmored/lightly (leather,) armored enemies. They had arrowheads that were simply metal cones or points designed specifically for piercing armor. A crossbow is an improvement over a bow in some areas, (but not all,) in that it takes much less training and practice to use well and it strains the wielder less. And crossbow bolts typically didn't have broad heads. Original ancient-medieval crossbow bolts were fatter, heavier and less accurate than a contemporary arrow. Crossbows were ultimately best used as defensive, short-to-mid range weapons. The modern crossbows you see firing arrow-like bolts are sporting weapons made with modern technology, not representative of what would have been available circa the 16th century. And with firearms it depends on the type of projectile being fired. The real difference between stringed weapons and firearms is that firearms have orders of magnitude more power. Regardless of what "type" of damage is being done, firearms simply do many, many times more damage than a bow or crossbow (or any melee weapon, for that matter,) can.

Better than $60 + another $10 for the on-disc DLC.

Smells like.... troll.

Humans are unique snowflakes in pretty much every single scifi universe. Star Wars? Just about everyone of any importance is human. Babylon 5? All it takes to get rid of species that have been around since the dawn of time is to have some human yell at them a bit (at least the end of ME3 did not involve the Shep telling the Reapers to "get the hell out of our galaxy" and have them leave like whipped curs). Star Trek? Wonderful, enlightened peace loving humanity brings fluffy bunnies, lentil soup, understanding and prosperity to all the peoples of the galaxy. Vulcans may say "live long and Prosper" but humans Make It So despite the past 10k years of our existence proving demonstrably that in reality We Cannae Do It. Awesome humanity saving the day for Johnny Foreigner Xenoer is a cliche that needs to die painfully, but it's a genre problem not one with any specific universe. Incidentially, there was an anime in the early 80s where the protagonists have an ancient alien giant robot (they found it when colonizing a planet,) that cleaves planets in half and destroys solar systems over the course of their battles with an alien race pursuing them across the galaxy in an attempt to obtain said robot (not the smartest aliens in that respect, they also looked suspiciously like Vulcans,) but by the end, all the cast dies. The protagonist is the last to die, and his dying act is to **** everything and use the robot's infinite power to destroy (subject to debate) either the entire galaxy or the entire universe, with complete disregard for the literally countless innocents of any/every species that were wiped out in one very human act of spite.

If they were inclined to implement this idea. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past already had your creeping underwater enemies, it wasn't scary, it was just an issue of timing. How is brown swamp muck slowing you down new and interesting? It's just one variant of terrain effects, something which has been discussed in other threads. It's been done in plenty of games already, you're not onto some cutting edge game design revolution here. It's standard practice for pretty much any swamp/marsh area in video games. I can't think of a single strategy game or TRPG that didn't include terrain effects, nor any that didn't include water/swamp/marsh terrains with penalties to most units standing in them. How is wading through brown swamp muck while getting chewed by mega-piranhas different from wading through radioactive muck in Fallout and taking damage over time or wading through lava and taking damage over time or wading through a poisonous swamp and taking damage over time? Yet P:E isn't a traditional IE game. What you're on about is an element of a game design concept that has existed for decades (terrain modifiers as well as terrain modification.) And terrain modification, too. Use your ice rod to freeze the body of water blocking your path, throw water on the lava to create a temporary rock bridge, knock down the tree to bridge the chasm, etc. etc. I did all that in the 16 and 32 bit console eras. Just because it hasn't been done in an IE or D&D cRPG doesn't mean it hasn't been done before. I'm all for terrain effects. I'm just saying that you're getting too puffed up over one specific aspect of a broader, well-established game design concept.

Man... you're really going all over the place here. I don't even what you're trying to say. The topic was about building structures (not really the realm of a crpg,) to factions to... what, exactly? "Could a "texture" mesh become an overlay correspondingly to textures around it as the "stronghold" grows? Is the place in the world a good trade route?" Your understanding of the technical terminology is... lacking. A texture is applied to a mesh. A mesh is, well... http://en.wikipedia....ki/Polygon_mesh I mean, when you're talking about an overlay, what are you even talking about? And growth? Trade routes? What does this have to do with texturing? Are you trying to talk about mipmaps? But P:E is primarily 3D. The one screenshot revealed was followed by a layer-by-layer breakdown of the scene, including the wireframe geometry of the environment. They're not going to be doing circa-1998 256 color dithered sprites. Which is ignoring the semantic fact that all the scenery is pre-drawn regardless of whether or not it's 3D.

They're busy re-scanning her face with next-gen technology so she can be in DA3 and ME4. This time she's mandatory in exchange for a guaranteed 9.5/10 or better review score.

A grid/tiles with terrain effects isn't exactly new or innovative. You've just described pretty much every turn-based strategy game's map for the past 20+ years. Let me just jump into Civ V for a moment and... There, now I've got a Hoplite fortified on a hill, yes, the hill cut the Hoplite unit's movement rate by half, but it also gave it a significant combat bonus. That in itself doesn't really apply to random encounters, does it? You're really addressing the concept of terrain effects rather than the concept of random encounters. Why would terrain effects be limited to random encounters? And that's an awful lot of villages for a land with no food sources, farms, etc.