AGX-17

R: "DIE, MONSTER! YOU DON'T BELONG IN THIS WORLD!" D: "IT WAS NOT BY MY HAND THAT I AM ONCE AGAIN GIVEN FLESH. I WAS CALLED HERE, BY HUMANS WHO WISH TO PAY ME TRIBUTE." R: "TRIBUTE?! YOU STEAL MEN'S SOULS, AND MAKE THEM YOUR SLAVES!" D: "PERHAPS THE SAME COULD BE SAID OF ALL RELIGIONS." R: "YOUR WORDS ARE AS EMPTY AS YOUR SOUL! MANKIND ILL NEEDS A SAVIOR SUCH AS YOU!" D: "BAH! WHAT IS A MAN? A MISERABLE LITTLE PILE OF SECRETS! BUT ENOUGH TALK, HAVE AT YOU!" The difference being that humans are the same species as humans, which, like all animals, have a genetic imperative to spread and diversify and multiply their genetic code. Cannibalism is resorted to only in emergencies by the sane, and only the insane derive pleasure from it. To engage in it would be detrimental to the species as a whole. It's not odd that predators would prey on other animals but not their own species. There are stupid, base animals like Bears (specifically the males,) that do cannibalize other bears, but like I said, they're base and stupid. Male bears will even eat their OWN cubs, they're so stupid and aggressive. At any rate, the concept of Necromancy is always depicted as evil madmen bent on enslaving the souls of victims they personally murdered or paved on a path of good intentions gone wrong (my beloved Julia, I cannot live without you! There must be some way...)

If you had a vicious (and loyal,) enough beast you could just let it hang out beyond the town walls so as not to terrorize the locals while simultaneously safeguarding your belongings. Assuming something nastier doesn't come along. And that's where the Stronghold would come in!

To be fair, as you progress in both AA and AC there are enemies who are immune to simple punching and kicking. There's a variety that blocks them and takes no damage, a variety that electrocutes you when you punch them, etc. At any rate, you are eventually forced to used varied abilities and tactics (claws, boomerang, takedowns, etc.) But the auto-aim criticism in an action game certainly still stands. Since discovering the connections between Chaos and difficulty and storyline (killing Weepers counts as killing innocents, even though technically you're doing them a favor if you put them down fast,) I've gone back to start a second run, trying to ghost and kill nobody. My original intent was to kill nobody but always blundered into trouble, so I'm using what I learn from those blundered missions (layouts, guard patrols, alternate paths,) to pull proper ghost runs on the second set of saves.

I thought about asking people how it was. But everyone's busy with XCOM. It's good. I had $50 and the choice was betwen Dishonored and XCOM (given a remake vs a new IP i'll take a new IP,) will definitely pick up XCOM when it goes on sale on Steam, but until then.... I AM THE RAT KIIIIING! Dishonored is a proper stealth game. It plays very much like Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (shock.) The controls are slightly less unintuitive than the previously mentioned titles, but it's still an improvement over Arkane's prior efforts. The really impressive aspect is the huge variety of ways to complete objectives. The climbing/blinking aspect works well, and straight combat is extremely dangerous. If you're dealing with multiple opponents, you'd better have a plan to kill them all (and thus cause more chaos and contribute to worse endings,) or run like hell, because on normal it takes maybe 3 hits to get killed. Stealth is vital regardless of what degree of lethality you're aiming for. The AI is actually pretty decent, too. There are lethal electric barriers around that don't harm officers/soldiers but kill anyone unauthorized that you can hack/reverse, and after the first few goons get vaporized chasing after you they'll avoid it like the plague. And most importantly, you can also be the rat king, summoning swarms of plague rats to strip the flesh from enemies' bones (literally.) God, I am going to get the worst ending. I did those Granny Rags quests and it increased the number of weepers, cut the number of thugs, and Slackjaw, the leader of the bootleggers, offered me some quests due to his new lack of muscle, including a non-lethal way of eliminating those brothers at the brothel (that I couldn't figure out because the waypoint/objective marker system is bad and didn't say where to go to do the job, and Dunwall is a supremely convoluted place.) The poor guidance is one of the biggest flaws. It points you to a rune that's under an inaccessible building and you miss it and it's gone forever because you couldn't figure out how to find it.

Honest Hearts is my favorite. Aside from Tribals. The story behind the Sorrows is really the only major, glaring flaw to HH for me. The biggest irony is when Joshua Graham calls his people a tribe and explains that it's simply a linked family of families. Wonder why they chose to disregard that when coming up with the idea of the Dead Horses and Sorrows, who started as educated, literate youths who were aided in survival by the Survivalist's gifts of books. They must have come up with some coming of age ceremony that involved trepanation with cazador stingers along the way. In the end it's all just tangential to Joshua Graham's story, anyway. That's what really put it on the top for me.

I don't know about you punk kids, but back in my day, we had paper and manual writing utensils. Hell, most game manuals came with a few blank lined notes pages for your convenience back in the 80s to the mid 90s!

Get drunk, fight ***tty. Reaction time and thus accuracy/evasiveness reduced significantly, trip over yourself and be left totally vulnerable while down, drunk characters' assigned tactics get swapped for inopportune ones at random due to drunken stupor. Seems straightforward. Maybe wake up in bed with an unattractive (or depending on your luck, very attractive) person of either sex? Add some kind of trauma perk as a reward.

The Tinker idea might be interesting. Leonardo da Vinci actually made a clockwork "knight" in his day (basically all it did was do the robot, he built it to wow his patrons and their guests at parties,) as well as designing a programmable, self-propelled cart. The plans for the cart still exist and reconstructions work, though the secret behind the clockwork knight are lost. Keep in mind that these early "programs" were designed entirely through the arrangement and types of clockwork driving the device. Those form a solid proof of concept that shows that in a renaissance-based world of magic and soul power, more impressive feats could be possible. It'd have to be a crafting-centered class, i.e. they want loot to improve their machinations rather than enrich themselves or equip themselves for battle. Disclaimer: This opinion may have been strongly influenced by the new Mechromancer class in Borderlands 2.

Suikoden was a great duology (3+ do not count on account of their being BAD.) But there wasn't a lot of customization involved in your castle. Anyway, it would be nice to get a choice of type of home. Personally I'm rather smitten with the tower-houses that started appearing in Europe in the late middle ages (and were a necessity of space constraints in renaissance cities.) Since this is a European-style setting, unfortunately, no Mesa Verde or Macchu Picchu type settlement is likely to be on the drawing board. Those places are aweesoooome.

A problem shared by... pretty much any RPG character that ever wore heavy armour. It's a legitimate concern in an RPG, but real militaries had things like supply lines. Hell, as long as there are ice or water magicks, it's irrelevant. I'll confess, it's something that is a minor irritation to me in most RPGs. DAO even showed your character waking up from a rest in full armour from time to time. Also, the helmet of Sutton Hoo is baller-tier. All the time in DAO, unless you specifically stripped your character of armor before rest. Of course, it also takes a good squire or two to get you into and out of a suit of plate armor. BTW: Yes, Rædwald (almost certainly his helm,) was the swaggest Saxon king. Known to modern man.

Funny story. William Wallace looked no different from the English he was fighting (full chain, nice robe, etc.) Boy Braveheart got a lot of things wrong. And don't even get me started with that garbage "artistic license" they took to make Isabella "She-Wolf" of France boinking him. She was 3 years old during Wallace's fight against England.

And the hairy ears.... I'm having trouble picturing that looking decent. Or something like furry ears that you might see on... Catgirls/boys. Neither of which seem terribly appealing. I doubt they'd come up with something that looked awful and terribly out of place in the setting though, so I'm guessing they simply have a lot more imagination than I. I certainly look forward to finally seeing what this, the other mysterious race and the Godlike races look like. Honestly, I'm cringing every time "furry" is mentioned in the context of PE. Please, Obsidian. Don't endeavour to attract.... THEM.

Seems to me that some of these actions would be best suited to passive skills that activate on a successful roll, rather than a planned-ahead tactic specifically chosen. e.g. You can't really choose "absorb enemy handaxe into your shield." It's more a matter of circumstance and the makes of both shield and weapon involved.

I don't mind high level encounters being available at any given time so long as the player does not necessarily have to enter the area and ample warning is provided that you need to be much stronger to have a chance. Throwing an invincible enemy at players of any level is simply poor game design. It's implicitly assumed by most players that if they hit a random encounter they have some chance of success (unless it's an Enclave patrol in Fallout 2, but the game's proper story never directed you to the Navarro region until you were at that point in the story, and you could run your ass away if you did blunder into them.) The player is the star, it's ultimately the player's story, and some cheap, unfair fight ending the quest just for ****s and giggles is not something we should be seeing. Unwinnable battles are the classic mark of a traditional JRPG, and they should stay that way. Actually, Japan, stop doing that, it's stupid. I know you guys (japan) hate nonlinearity, choice, player initiative and characters who could realistically be capable of lifting a 500lb sword, but really. Come on. At least western RPGs are catching on there finally. Conformist confucionist cowards! I don't think an unbeatable boss qualifies as a Mary Sue.

Sometimes TES games give you skill increases for opening a book (that doesn't necessarily make you read it.) I don't think you should be forced into it, since they're there for lore and flavor (which I'm all for,) but some people might get burnt out on reading text, reading combat notifications and reading novellas and poems constantly. Reading is great, but there are times and places for everything. Obviously the contents will be worth reading. This is Obsidian we're talking about. Besides, what if you're playing an illiterate bumpkin character? Actually.... They should have fancifully illustrated books, walls of churches covered in illustrative statuary and similar methods the powers of the middle ages used to communicate primarily biblical messages to the illiterate. An image, icon or symbol can be more powerful than the written word. People were making art tens of thousands of years before they came up with written languages (a necessity born of economics rather than intellectual or philosophical purposes.)

That is Elders Scrolls system. If u follow BG, IW, ToEE, u`ll now it is 1-20 or 1-18... So what we want? An Elder Scrolls-style system is a terrible idea (and there is no way Obsidian would go with such a thing, they did their best to at least tone down Bethesda's ruined version of SPECIAL in New Vegas.) It has always functioned terribly because it is infinitely exploitable even without trying. Bethesda's game designers seem to think it makes sense for an elderly hermit who spent his entire life studying a particular school of magic to suddenly become a ripped Adonis, marathon champ and master swordsman on a whim of the twilight of his life. 5 minutes of making iron daggers makes you the most legendary of legendary smiths in Skyrim. If you asked a Beth designer to get on the see-saw with you he'd bring 6 of his friends and they'd all just sit there on their side grinning stupidly at you and asking for their GOTY awards.

It would go a decent way to trashing the old tropes of "elves are woodland rangers" and "humans are paladin zealots espousing a thinly veiled imitation of christianity at the point of a sword." Not that racial stereotypes shouldn't exist to some degree, because they sure still do in reality.

What about EXP assigned based on actual contributions? The character who did the least activity gets the least experience, and vice versa?

It might be a bit of a stretch, but items you sell should end up in the hands of NPCs. Like you go recruit some novice Adventurer and he's wearing trashy gear you pawned off after a disappointing dungeon run! It wouldn't be much of a world if there were only 2-3 travelling merchants. City-states like Firenze and Milano flourished in the Renaissance due to hundreds or thousands of merchant ships passing through their ports every year, not one or two. If you have 2-3 travelling merchants passing through your town in a given year, your town is probably an insignificant hamlet. Probably with rumors of a terrible curse/disease/demon.

Well, I'm sure the "heroes" on the Nexus network will get straight to work on prettying up your waifus once the game is out and moddable.

A problem shared by... pretty much any RPG character that ever wore heavy armour. It's a legitimate concern in an RPG, but real militaries had things like supply lines. Hell, as long as there are ice or water magicks, it's irrelevant.

Well, most people who could afford plate could also afford And it's not like iron chainmail is light, either. Just an example off the top of my head, Roman soldiers spent much of their downtime on strength training. Their practice weapons and armor were much heavier than the real thing, and they carried a lot of weight on the march (in the range of 40 kilos if I remember correctly.) This varied depending on a legionary's rank and assignment, so it often could have been higher. But maybe she had ROCKET LAUNCHERS hidden in there!

You would have to be one godlike lump of cheese to possess sentience.

I thought this was a news thread.

Gorgonzolas. They're a race of men made of sentient cheese.