AGX-17

Honestly, I have to admit, very little music in the IE games stood out to me. Waukeen's Promenade always sounds like "generic middle-eastern themed city" to me. Western video game music hasn't stood out to me in general since Warcraft II, Starcraft and Fallout. A few individual tracks usually stand out to me in recent releases, but I wouldn't pay for a soundtrack to most of the games I've bought in the last 6 years. Even a game as action-heavy as Borderlands 2's music is mostly ambient acoustic guitar strumming, more suited to desert rambling than contstant vicious gunfights, second winds and explosions. Honestly, the dubstep trend they make fun of in the "wub wub" trailer feels like it would be a better fit thematically. And I don't even like dubstep. I guess what i'd ask for is more strongly melodious music rather than ambient music that tries to stay out of the way. Curse (or blessing) of growing up in the 8 and 16 bit console era, I suppose. This is the sort of music that stands out to me in a video game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3gEKpGD4D4

Generally speaking, unless you're willing to pursue the goal in full, no. If you're in a blizzard in an ice region and your characters have no cold weather clothing, it's not merely "something to endure" because they're going to die of hypothermia and lose body parts. Skyrim's characters should all be dead from hypothermia, to be honest. Being forced to fight in some kind of constant-damage zone in the environment isn't very fun unless there's some way to mitigate/avoid it or the enemies suffer the full effects as well. There's nothing fun about having to fight poison immune enemies in a poisonous swamp that is poisoning you. It was just irritating to have to find special anti-radiation booties to cross green puddles even if you had power armor in Fallout 2.

Disconnect? That implies that a connection has been established. This is not exactly ideal terminology for "dodging a spell." I don't see how dodging a spell would be any different from dodging a physical projectile or melee attack. Do you mean some kind of partial deflection/dodge, like initially getting engulfed by an AOE flame spell but escaping from its AOE before the spell has run its course, thus avoiding the full damage? It seems like you're describing Kiting, in that case.

A monotheistic religion doesn't necessarily have to deny the existence of other gods. All it has to do is exclusively worship one god. The monotheists could just declare that their one god is mightier than all other gods. And your line "So, could there be "spirits" that can be appealed to? Could there be divine beings that claim they are the substance of existence, they claim to be something so transcendent that it avoids the particular nature of a local deity?" is basically a description of Shinto's Kami, which are literally the spirits that dwell within something (everything, in fact.) Houses, trees, tools, mountains, rocks, etc. And they can become transcendent if respected, revered, worshipped, given offerings, etc. Say the hammer of a recently deceased legendary smith, who loved that hammer and forged all his finest works with it, is treated with reverence after his death. The kami of that hammer will have become more godlike thanks to the smith's love of his tool, and will become more powerful as others revere the object out of respect for the smith and his works. As the cult status spreads, the spirit of the smith's hammer becomes the god of the smith's hammer, not just the smith in question, but of all smiths' hammers. Smiths will pray to and make offerings to the god of the smith's hammer to help them make better blades, etc. Stories like this are relatively common even in Japanese pop culture.

Real world pantheons have been bound by the culture/s that worship them and typically a shared origin, not a shared theme to what they deify. The Greco-Roman pantheon has a multitude of gods both major and minor, covering pretty much every area conceivable by Hellenes, unified primarily by a shared line of descent from Gaia and Uranus, not by any overarching concept like "nature" or "fame," (something I've never heard of a god of, much less a pantheon of gods of.) The Hellenic religion overlapped with other religions of the Mediterranean region, with gods from one pantheon being adopted by other religions and so on. Leaving things like emotions and technology out is folly, because there are gods and goddesses for emotions especially in all manner of religions. For a different example, the native Japanese Shinto religion, as an animist religion, believes in theoretically infinite gods, aside from a base pantheon of creator/major gods, Shinto holds that there is a kami for everything, residing in everything. Kami means both "spirit" and "god" simultaneously, so these spirits can be regarded as gods, and if they are treated well or respected or worshiped they can become more powerful gods with more influence proportionally with how much reverence and faith they receive. The phenomenon of gods overlapping in different pantheons tended to happen all over the world in ancient times, because in both China and Japan, Buddhist deities were frequently commandeered by the indigenous religions and worshiped by people who hadn't converted to Buddhism. And many Buddhist deities were, in turn, borrowed from Hinduism, and so on.

Borderlands 2, even though the game I've most hotly anticipated hasn't come out yet.

Because "fine art" is defined, by the art world, as art created primarily for the purpose of evoking aesthetic pleasure. Propaganda posters are not fine art because they are not meant to evoke aesthetic pleasure, they're meant to influence people's beliefs or actions. Propaganda posters are applied art. Did I make any allusion as to the quality of the art? No. Did I say it was not art at all? No. I said it was not fine art because it is not fine art. Once again, it is applied art. Furthermore, your immature ad hominem attacks do not improve your position any more than your ignorance. Do you accuse your teachers of being "arrogant pricks" every time they finish a sentence? Art is a subjective experience. To proclaim anything as "the best art ever" is simply stubborn arrogance, a show of closed-mindedness, a refusal to accept the fact that there are subjective truths in the world, and not all of them are in line with your own.

Oh well there should be a mod abloobloobloo. Stop it with this sense of entitlement. You don't get to have everything your way. Learn to mod and script and make your own if it's so dear to you. That still won't make it canon, though. And why would House want Yes Man as his "liutenant"? That's what the Courier is. The Courier is a free agent with free will, and anyone could come along and tell Yes Man to sabotage House's plans in some way and he'd do it because he's programmed to do whatever ANYONE tells him to. House's Securitrons ALREADY are programmed to do only what HOUSE says. Yes Man literally does not differ from any other securitron except that he's a MASSIVE SECURITY RISK. How does that not compute in your head? Yes Man is essentially a trojan horse backdoor security risk whereas every other Securitron is perfectly... secure. You might as well say people should download this Russian pirated game .iso because it's exactly the same as the retail game except for the keystroke logger that's included in the file. It'll be just as fun and helpful, too! If you were in medieval times, in a beseiged castle, when a plague-infested corpse gets trebuchet'ed over the wall, you'd tell everybody to give it a hug and take turns bedding down with it because it is just so trustworthy and useful. And cite a source when you claim that there was supposed to be a House-BoS alliance that was cut from the game. Because I have never seen a shred of evidence of that. House's dialogue is crystal clear that the BoS is not going to tolerate him and he is crystal clear that he is not going to tolerate the BoS. All they do is harass and rob the people who are coming to Vegas to enrich House's burgeoning empire. House reaps no economic benefit from the BoS' presence. Literally zero benefit. The NCR is his cash cow. The BoS is an enemy of the NCR. The BoS is a threat to his revenue streams. House has no use for fanatical humans devoted to some crackpot tech-worship religion when they fire on sight when they spot his Securitrons. And Obsidian is not making Fallout 4. The only rumors out are that Bethesda staff have been doing recon in Boston and at MIT. Strongly alluded to in Fallout 3. Obsidian has stated clearly that they are not making a Fallout game and they would love to do another one (as they are currently not doing one, they are doing a South Park game and Project Eternity.) And if you play the game oriented toward NCR and doing good, the problems of the NCR will be mitigated. If you play Caesar's Legion, the NCR will be defeated in the Mojave. There are myriad possible endings and no established canon.

Yeah, there's nothing more immersive than jumping from visually identical "jump tree" to visually identical "jump tree."

I don't remember Silent Hill 2 being full of jelly-men. Cool diabetes, bro. It's some kind of Land-Snork.

The character's skill is just that, the character's skill. The player's skill shouldn't enter into it. Look at Oblivion lockpicking for the worst possible implementation. A skilled player can open any lock of any level right off the bat (level 1, no bonuses to lockpicking,) unless it's one of those quest-related "key required" doors, without regard for the character's skill. And then they can complete a low level quest whose reward allows them to unlock every lock automatically without fail, making the lockpicking skill just another thing to grind to get levelled or increase an attribute.

Q is just another example of the "trickster" character archetype, one that goes back to ancient times. Besides, plenty of real world mythologies are full of gods who liked to mess with mortals for fun, like Zeus. Whose idea of messing with mortals for fun was turning into an animal and raping women. As an animal.

Why didn't you post this on Bioware's forums? It's a rant obviously aimed at Bioware and Obsidian wasn't involved with Dragon Age or 2 in any way (unless there's some massive CRPG destruction conspiracy going on behind the scenes.) I don't know where you might have gotten the idea that PE would be taking its cues from Dragon Age 2, anyway.

How is that a god? If they were a god they wouldn't need technology. Also you pretty much just described The Doctor. I'm sorry, you guys are just coming up with so many ideas that I've already seen done I can't help but try to shoot them down.

You just described a Muse. The Greek god Ares is essentially what you're describing. Ares embodied to some degree the courage needed to fight a war, but to the Greeks he embodied all the worst aspects of war, dishonorable acts, chaos (which is the worst thing anyone can embody in the Hellenic worldview,) destruction, cruelty, etc. and thus they were ambivalent about him at best, at least in the intellectual class, whereas Athena is the Goddess of War and Wisdom and embodies all the noble and intellectual aspects of war. It should come as no surprise that the people of Athens chose Athena as their patron deity over a god like Ares. That's not even touching on the nature/nurture debate (last I checked the majority of people diagnosed as psychopaths suffered some form of childhood abuse or neglect.) Obviously there's no DSM in the world of PE, so psychopathy might not even be a thing in this world.

Just... no. Aside from the Jamaican accent part, Japanese gaming already beat you to the punch with a frog goddess of fertility and pestilence (depending on whether or not you worship her and depending on how you behave toward frogs.)

Incidentially, Chris Avellone confirmed on Twitter a while back (when the DLCs were actually new,) that they apparently nerfed Sneaking in OWB and Lonesome Road. Can't remember what the justification was, though (probably memory again.) And no clue how one would go about fixing it. So yeah, sneaking was broken and OWB had bullet sponge enemies that could spot you even with a stealth boy on. Which is why it's so painfully ironic that the flagship piece of loot is a "stealth suit" (which talks in an irritating voice? How does that improve stealthiness? And why doesn't the radio decrease sneaking ability?!) that can't work in its area of origin. Might as well make things right (do what nature would have, if not for The Master,) and put her down, then.

Propaganda posters don't fall under the category of "fine art." Did you notice the tag "best art ever"? Now that made me laugh.

Why not post this in the steam or what i've been playing threads?

First, it's Physics, not Physixs. Second, this is an isometric realtime w/ pause game. Set in a fantasy world full of magic. When Cadegund fires her musket at an enemy, the accuracy and damage will be determined by simulated dice rolls, not physics calculations. It's not going to be a first-person action RPG like Dark Messiah. Whose physics were not accurate in the first place. Kicking a man toward a wall covered thickly in spikes will not result in his guaranteed impalement. It will not result in impalement at all, if real world physics are applied. That is itself highly unlikely. Why license a physics modeling engine when you can simply have an animator animate a barrel breaking animation? It's a given that almost zero of the game's backers are looking for realtime physics modelling in this, they're looking for an IE-inspired RPG with strong writing and story. Practically nobody is going to be upset if explosions don't accurately send dirt, rocks and branches flying in accurately modeled trajectories. And human bodies don't even go flying when exploded, so that's right out. What use is there for ragdoll physics in an isometric game in the first place? They don't even accurately model the physical motions of a human body gone limp/unconscious/dead.

It has been said many times by Obsidian staffers that they don't like Black and White, Good vs. Evil morality and that they want to explore mature themes in the game, so it is extremely unlikely that any such thing will come into play. The idea of a black and white morality is an immature, stubbornly self-deluding one.

Actually, they've said the game is being designed so that the player character alone can complete it without a party. Anyway, I don't like it when you're railroaded into bringing a specific party composition because that's the only possible way to succeed. i.e. Being forced into the standard tank attracts hostility, mage does damage, healer keeps tank alive scenario.

If you're not averse to emulation, you can find a fully English translated Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden for PS, which is a tactical RPG. Easily the most prolific TRPG series in existence. If you want an idea of how the games play the game Zone of the Enders 2173 Testament for GBA (which had a NA release,) is basically a SRW clone with a goofy optional realtime aiming minigame added. If turned off it plays similar to SRW (hit, evade and critical chance based on derived stats and RNG 'dice rolls',) albeit with some major elements missing.

That is little improvement over the chainmail bikini. Also it's a skirt. That is most certainly not made of metal chain. It's sequined fabric. Besides, you might as well propose a chainmail hobble-skirt.

But the failure state is always a present threat, it's failure in combat and the resulting death/s of your character/s. This rigged poll demands that failure is the only possible result of the game's main storyline quest's completion.