AGX-17

I've never understood the appeal of sitting around watching NPCs fight each other. Or the idea that some demon hellspawn will fight to the death for some lumpy guy in a robe because he read a book once. There are contexts where it makes sense, but not a lot of them.

I really wish there was an "ROFL" emoticon on this board. Setting aside the fact that you're referring to a comical mascot character whose ability was "Dance," an ability whose results were random and unrelated to illusion magic... Illusion magic has been done before, albeit not sensibly. Ultimately all it theoretically could do is confuse an enemy. Pretty much everything that has been associated with illusion magic in other games seems to fall solidly under the Cipher's intended role.

So... do you have a point beyond pointing out that most fantasy worlds are wildly unrealistic?

Tell your wife to be less obnoxious.

Not just France, Japan too. One badass mother****er going by the name of Miyamoto Musashi. http://en.wikipedia...._Niten_Ichi-ryū He wasn't just an undefeated duelist, he was a veteran of several battles of the Sengoku/Warring States period, so he was no feeble rogue-like. Note that Musashi was also an accomplished artist, calligrapher, writer, philosopher, zen buddhist and military strategist, among other things. Here's one of his paintings. So anyone who had objections to separating combat and non combat skills and giving them their own independent point pools (a subject of somewhat vigorous debate in several other threads,) can take a look at Musashi, and have fun tasting their feet. No, a cowering-plate is not a weapon.

When Failion started talking about JRPG waifs brandishing 10x their body weight as being examples of "strong women" in gaming (in the sexism in video game communities sense,) and accusing of sexism anyone of calling out the fallacious physics of that as BS. These are games where they don't even bother to try to justify these things by saying "it's a magic axe, light as a feather," or "a wizard did it." Suspension of disbelief can only go so far. When you have a Japanese schoolgirl running around with a sword bigger than a car, you've overdone it. And it's not even uncommon, either.

So when was the last time you saw a business in the US or Europe using mules to transport their goods instead of trucks, trains and cargo ships? I REST MY CASE, YOUR HONOR JUSTICE OF THE PEACE: "Case dismissed." It's only in the developing world that people use these animals for the purposes of transport, and only because they can't afford motor vehicles or the fuel to power them. Trucks, trains, planes and automobiles are economically vastly more efficient for any operation larger than a subsistance farm. You can buy a passable used car for less than the cost of an average mule in the first world. A good horse will set you back much more than that. And mules aren't used for much more than transporting people on rough terrain where no motor vehicle can proceed (like into the Grand Canyon.) And the farmers who can't afford a combine harvester or what have you still relies on trucks to ship crops to market before they spoil. I have a nagging suspicion you don't actually know anything about farming in the developed world. So what's reasonable, 10 times what a normal person can carry? 100 times? 1000? At what point do our hammerspace bags fill up and we begin having to use the mule? Besides the whole "must pick up everything to sell!" mentality kind of goes away on its own since in most of these games the "basic" items become worthless really quickly compared to the price of **** you need to buy. On top of that money as a whole usually becomes meaningless by the end when you're able to afford everything easily anyway. As I hear it, a mule can carry about 20% of its body weight, tops. They're used for endurance, not strength. If you wanted to carry a huge amount you'd need a wagon and a team of oxen (easy to steal, both.) A horse can carry more (30%,) but doesn't have the stamina/endurance of a mule. The concept that makes the most sense to me is to have companions not in your party guard your oxcart and escort it between locations, and have you some kind of safe storage area in some towns like a vault in the stronghold.

It has been informal public knowledge for the past 4+ years that PV13 was a Fallout MMORPG, but after Interplay lost the court battle with Bethesda they had to start over from scratch without license to produce a Fallout MMO, if I remember my facts straight. Herve Caen is French, not American. He brought his terrible French ideas with him when he bought Interplay and ran it into ruin. Yes, it is the French who thought Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel and other console games of the like were the future and a still solvent, income generating Black Isle was dead weight. French backers of P:E, reflect on this and seek penance. Wear hair shirts under your normal clothing, engage in self-flagellation, and continue to eat disgusting things like frogs and snails. Wait, scratch the last bit, I forgot French people enjoy that. Eat German food as a part of your penance.

A car has power and security compared to a beast of burden, a pack animal like a donkey or ox is slow and stupid and prone to wandering off or getting stolen (you can't lock a mule or the burlap sacks it has slung over its back.) There's a reason most farmers in the first world now use tractors and combine harvesters rather than oxen. The car getting stolen in Fallout 2 is a one-off that occurs in one of the most populated cities in the game, and it's stolen by people who have the knowledge and skill to bypass the security of your car as well as operate it. In the medieval world, all you had to do to steal an animal was untie its reins and then lead it away from where it was tied. For people who live in conditions where animals are no longer a utilitarian necessity, people for whom seeing a horse is a novelty tourist experience (you would have to search far and wide to find an ox if you live in the developed world,) animals don't come across as the best solution when they've already played games with more efficient alternatives (magic bags, teleportation spells, etc.) Generally, I don't like the idea of a defenseless beast of burden taking up a party slot arbitrarily (all other companions except the first 4 will refuse to travel in the presence of a donkey? How do you justify this in the game world?) much less the idea of this beast being subject to death or theft. What's the point of carrying all this stuff if the ass gets killed at the bottom of a dungeon and now you've got 3 dungeons' worth of loot lying at the bottom of a dungeon?

A katana is not a hefty weapon to begin with. At any rate, real world dual-weapon fighting styles pretty much exclusively paired a light sword/saber with a dagger or equivalent. Although it was not unheard of for norse raiders to brandish two hand axes at a time in battle, this was still small hand axes, not big battleaxes. A scrawny pedobait 12 year old girl brandishing a monstrous battleaxe larger than any of her compatriots is stupid JRPG fluff, not a depiction of "strong women." Also I like the way you run into this tangent ad hominem attack on Americans (when railing against a poster who isn't American.) Ancient humans were not superhuman in strength, they were no different from people today who perform the same sort of labor. People going hungry in Africa are not rippling with strength enough to tear a feeble "American" in half, they're no stronger than their environment and economic station allows them to be. A starving child with flies in his eyes and a distended belly is hardly the mightiest strongman in the world. Any powerlifter in the olympics today can certifiably lift more than any ancient man (and face facts: men are biologically bigger and stronger than women, my feminist cousin with a degree in womens' studies will tell you that much,) could ever hope to. An entire life devoted to strength training, coupled with nutritional/protein supplements and testosterone and other hormone injections is so far beyond the scarce and fragile nature of food for humans in the ancient world. Unless you were royalty or nobility you could never hope to see the amount and variety of food even a middle-class family sees on its plates in the modern world. These were people living hardscrabble on hard bread and what little other crops or livestock they had to subsist on, not mighty adonises living in a golden age of plenty. Humans are not animals built for strength, anyway. Humans are animals built for stamina. The first humans on the savannas of west africa 100,000+/- years ago hunted on those open plains by outlasting their prey, not by outrunning them.

They've spent a lot of money on a lot of bullets to shoot themselves in the foot over the past 10 years, it's no surprise.

Why would they "command undead"? Priests aren't necromancers, they're the opposite. They're the antithesis of necromancers. Priests should be consecrating the defiled corpses perverted by necromancy, or attempting to save the souls enslaved by necromancers if that's how necromancy works in a given context. It doesn't seem to be apparent that they're going to have an individualized Priest class for every race, culture and religion. If there's a religion where necromancers are the priests and the community is full of rotting loved ones shambling around infusing the town with a rank malodor for the comfort of their survivors, that's probably not going to be represented by the Priest class.

What you are proposing is called "fraud" in legal terms.

Infinite possiblity? Unexplored area? It's been done in Bioware games. Recent Bioware games. ME2-3 and DA2.

I heard about it in the context of news that it looked like a blatant ripoff of the ARMAII mod Day Z. Also this is unprecedented, Steam has never allowed refunds for anything before, that I'm aware of. Refunds certainly aren't offered in its TOS.

That stupid little gibbon starchild kid running around in circles with misproportioned arms and legs was "kick ass"? Really?

No. Get a real pet.

...Cool tangent. Patent troll lawsuits for copyright infringement have what to do with piracy, exactly?

Last I heard in the updates they were discussing a 12 level cap. Not a thrilling prospect, to me. It's family-friendly. Forum Guidlines Still the most hilarious irony considering I haven't seen an Obsidian title that was "family-friendly." I'm sure that'll change when The Stick of Truth comes out.

A serrated knife isn't outlandish. And if a trident and net are good enough for Meera Reed, they're good enough for me. The existing weapon and armor discussion has revolved almost entirely around the fact that people don't want WoW-style weapons and armor (which is what I thought as soon as I saw your thread title.) At any rate, the game's setting is likened to the transition from the high middle ages to the renaissance. So there's not really room for outdated ideas like Roman gladiators (who were not soldiers and they were equipped and trained for fights meant to entertain, not to win wars. If you put Roman soldiers up against gladiators the gladiators would be el-****ed.)

How are those games not "hand drawn"? Human modelers and animators had to make all the meshes and textures for those games, too. Robots didn't make them with their cold robot claws. Being forced into a conversation and keeping the world animated during the conversation are two different things. The whole world stopping in full view was a big complaint in Bethesda's past few games so they actually advertised characters still going about their business in the background during conversations. Only problem is, if some NPC decides to force you into a conversation in combat, you're defenseless and can be killed while trapped in a dialogue menu.

There's plenty of grey morality to be found all over the western world, it's just not in the form of warfare. A world of black & white is more comfortable than a world of grey. A world where your own government, your own people are responsible for the deaths of innocents or people who want to make the world a better place is harder to stomach than one where your government only kills/imprisons/tortures terrorists, rebels and spies. As for politics, it always boils down to the ruling class vs. the ruled class. It was true of ancient civilizations and it is still true today. Even in republics with free & fair elections, the candidates are almost exclusively members of the ruling elite to begin with, an unspoken prerequisite of the right to rule. Human society, with a few exceptions, has always been shaped in the same way as most social animals, the "strongest" dominate all those who are weaker until someone stronger replaces the former Alpha.

You'd think a guy with your profile picture would have respect for the pursuit of the "Holly Buck."

I didn't like that guy so much. Just replayed BG2 and was amazed how dramatic and overexaggerated his narration sounded. That sounded pretty.... passable and average to me. I assume you meant "melodramatic," which it wasn't at all (it was meant to be dramatic, or are you admitting it succeeded at its purpose?) This is melodramatic acting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMTizJemHO8

Skyrim is 2011 though. And everybody (major gaming media outlets) already called it GOTY 2011.