AGX-17

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.

But an encryption isn't a language. If it's just an encrypted form of the base language, it's an encrypted form of the language, not a different language. Learning a language and en/decoding an encryption are two different cognitive feats. Language is more than just shuffling and replacing letters, there's grammar, syntax, semantics, tone, etc.

Why would it be scary? This isn't Oregon Trail, is it? Also, note, electric eels are not a threat to human life. And if it was going to be some amazon swamp-jungle area there wouldn't be anything remotely interesting or appealing or complex about the water visuals, it would just be solid green/brown murk. Besides, what's to stop a wizard from freezing the surface or raising a bridge of stone across if it's so deadly to ford a stream? Not like a piranha can bite through steel, anyway.

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.

A drill is a man's romance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzpY6pLIMQs

The game's combat system is designated as "realtime with pause," not "realtime." That's really all there is to it. In an MMO, each character is being controlled in realtime by a human player. In a game like P:E, a single human player has to manage and direct the tactics of the entire party in a game environment specifically designed to allow or even necessitate pausing. If you don't want to play the game with pausing, don't pause it. That's really all there is to it.

How was Ouya ever "extremely dodgy"? Opinions. Speaking of opinions, and Ouya, it looks as though it's just an Android smartphone/tablet with most of the smartphone/tablet capabilities removed except gaming apps, and a control pad instead of touch screen controls. That's fine for casual, cheap gaming, but it's not going to be a competitor for "hardcore" gaming/gamers whose primary entertainment source is video games. I know it's supposed to be fully modifiable, but I doubt you can stick a core i7 and GTX 680 in there, much less find games that could utilize more than 2-5% of that processing/rendering power.

I'm not advocating the idea, I'm saying that's how the concept would work if you applied logic to it.

Well, the idea behind Sting glowing is to alert its owner that there are Orcs creeping about in the shadows, not vice versa. If you're hiding from the orcs you already know they're there. And ignoring the fact that orcs are not going to be in P:E, a sword that can suck up hundreds of souls would be some kind of abomination forged by the most powerful and evil demons of whatever hells might exist in that world. Besides that, such a soul-entrapping weapon filled with 100 souls of 'x' species/race would be hampered by that host of 100 'x' souls. If you have a sword full of vengeful orc ghosts (not in the P:E context since there are no orcs in P:E,) they're going to do whatever they can to hinder you in combat against orcs so that their deaths might be avenged by their own bretheren.

I seriously doubt that, the Protheans, with resources spanning the ENTIRE galaxy, can only make a pair of prototype mass relay, The Conduit. Only a pair! a prototype pair, even. The Salarians, the so-called nerds of the galaxy, has used the relays for thousand years, and they haven't figured how it works, or else we would be seeing their prototype in game. The Asari, Turians, and Salarians combined can't figure it out either. Humans can't possibly know how it works after only 26 years using it :D, that's just too Mary Sue-y. Oh wait, this is Mass Effect. The crap (as usual,) in-game explanation is that the Asari banned any attempt to investigate or reverse engineer "Prothean" technology. So everyone went along with that. For 4000 years. Despite the Rachni wars. And the Krogan rebellion. Until the obviously unique and snowflake-special human race appeared, of course. Humans are a collective Mary-Sue in the Mass Effect universe. Despite every human except some of the face-scanned NPCs and the occasional well-crafted custom Shepard being hideous. Incidentially, Canada is the Mary-Sue nation state of planet Earth in the ME universe. Imagine that.

Wake up on the wrong side of the bed? Nah, just arguing with my dad on the ride into work about a teacher's labour issue this morning. Or most mornings, rather fun to argue Abject terror is more effective if you want to be up and alert as quickly as possible.

It depends on the person/character, really. A nature-worshiping hippie/elf ranger/druid probably wouldn't be pleased by flashy, gaudy, expensive jewelry. And a pampered, spoiled rich girl might just see you as someone to exploit as a result.

But Sting reacts to orcs, orcs don't react to Sting. There's certainly merit in the idea of NPCs being intimidated (or the opposite,) by your species, soul, class, equipped gear or so on. So, this might be more intimidating: than this:

Dafuq? I've only played the game through once but i never ever used melee or magic. Just guns, especially the sniper/scoped rifle and the elephant? gun. Even with above the standard perception and points invested in gun skill, i'm still getting around 37% hit chance with a flintlock (at point blank range, the combat system also makes it nigh-impossible to maintain distance from enemies,) bought from the starting merchant interface. I'm running out of ammo because of all the classic D&D era missfests. And the critical miss rate is ludicrously high. Everything I've read up on about the game on the internet says basically what I've experienced, that the gameplay balance is decidedly skewed in favor of melee and magic. It doesn't help that it's totally stacked against non-combat builds. You can't run from combat or random encounters, and sometimes your companions will be missing from random encounters so you're completely ****ed. I'm starting to understand why Chris Avellone doesn't want to play it. I'd love to see the concept done with a better ruleset/more modern game design, because the whole tech vs. magic setting is what got me to buy it in the first place (also the $2.99 price on GOG.) I also liked the idea of physical attractiveness being a seperate concept from charisma, though it could have been implemented with more depth in both NPC interaction and combat (i.e. if you're a really attractive woman, male enemy combatants would suffer combat penalties proportional to their Reaction to you, rather than reaction dropping to 0 upon entering combat.) This. Combined with ammo limitations and the fact that you get a niggardly one point per level to invest in both primary attributes AND skills it's close to unplayable, and with such a limited capacity for character growth you're basically wasting points for half the game. It would would have been a lot better if it had used the SPECIAL system and Fallout-like combat mechanics. Looks like this is now the "Why Arcanum isn't a very good game" thread, at least for the moment.

...Which is kind of really tangential to the binary issue of the topic: "romance? y/n".

Waste of time fetch quest. Planescape: Torment let you understand the Dabus rebuses if your Wisdom is high enough.

You don't read enough of Osvir's threads. His other threads have absolutely nothing to do with what I think of this one - why would they? Why wouldn't they? You already established that you're comparing this to every other idea ever posted on the forum. As you quoted yourself saying.

TrashMan, if you wanted to make an anime thread you should have just made an anime thread.

You mean a planet with a ring system.

You don't read enough of Osvir's threads.

You get the option 'playthrough mode' after beating the game. Adds new enemies and substitutes various baddies with beefier ones. Also randomly spawns enemies that are a few levels higher than you which is great equipment wise, your guns are no longer constantly decaying in relative level. You would really be better off starting your game from lv 35 or so with someone elses save/profile. Various builds are possible and the combat is actually challenging. All that time you spend being low level is a huge waste since both quests and gear will become obsolete very quickly and you don't get to use your skills, or at least not the ones you wanted. True Vault Hunter mode. It can get excessively difficult to play without a full team armed with Orange-tier weapons once you hit the level cap of 50 and every enemy is above the cap. Speaking of difficult, I started Arcanum with the intent of playing a charismatic gunslinger type of character and learned the hard way that it's basically a melee/magic combat game. Also succeeding in my clean hands/ghost run in Dishonored, against all expectations.