AGX-17

It makes sense if the character is some merc hireling who's only in it for the loot, but you can't have some Paladin refusing to uphold his oath to destroy the great evil because the leader of the great-evil-destroying-party won't give him a present. Obviously there would have to be some negotiation involved with a merc, they couldn't just claim the best stuff for themselves as they wouldn't be there if they hadn't been hired by the PC. Besides, if the party acknowledges and accepts the PC as the designated leader, they're naturally deferring to him/her on tactics and such anyway. And food and lodging typically don't matter or are covered by the player's out of pocket money. If an NPC owns their own prized equipment, the player shouldn't be allowed to just snatch it and pawn it. If you want to give them better gear, they should go ahead and use it, while still keeping their family heirloom, trusty Seax or what have you. Well, they've got to be paid in some way if they're swords-for-hire. If you give them the rusty sword of tetanus when they did the bulk of the fighting and saved your life from a horrendous tentacled beast, they ought to go back and tell all the Adventurers "hey this guy is an ****, don't work for him," and maybe hire one of those rival adventuring parties to give you a good killing.

Saying Asian countries hate drugs is hyperbole. Japan, for example, loves them some booze. The native alcohol, Sake, is a wine made from rice. Beer is immensely popular there as well. You can almost certainly find Japanese beers (big brands like Asahi or Kirin,) in more upscale grocery stores. And notice that the culprit was a Japanese teen in possession of marijuana.

I like the idea of the freedom it provides, but it does kind of run counter to the concept of a class system to begin with. At the same time, it seems like the Soul system in PE is basically providing magic-type abilities to all classes, so that's a sort of multi-classing in itself.

Most RPGs tend to avoid the misogynistic patriarchal realities of human history (thought it varied, the Greeks were balls-out misogynists whose ideal sexual relationship was between a man and an underage boy, the Romans reputedly reminded their Greek subjects/slaves of that immoral behavior and saw the pleasures of a woman as much superior,). It'd be nice to see maybe one country/society with a matriarchal power structure (something which has rarely occurred in human history,) but other lands mirror reality to a greater degree, and female characters in those lands are expected to be submissive wives and mothers. Any women adventurers would be unusual, have to come from a nonconformist/outcast background and have to work twice as hard and smash a lot of heads to gain respect from the powers that be and men in general. It's disingenuous when a developer says they're making a medieval style RPG and have women functionally indistinguishable from men. Women in the USA still only earn 70 cents for every dollar a man makes doing the same job, and they often have to work harder and longer just to be considered as valuable as a man in the workplace, if they're lucky. If a female PC accomplishes some great feat, it should be news/rumor that emboldens women and troubles men, there should be knights and nobles and thugs who refuse to believe it, and that female PC should get a chance to prove her mettle by dueling said knights and just trashing the thugs (and winning, of course. Unless you lose and GAME OVER.)

Tat screenie is boootyful.

Same. I thought about Wasteland 2, dithered, missed the deadline so I've resigned to buying it, but I love Obsidian's work so much that I had to contribute on day one. But it was actually day two. SORRY.

I'm not a big fan of the Austrian school - although we agree that the fed is currently one of the biggest problems in modern economy. The fundamental problem imo is, that the system assumes the highest level of responsibility from the consumer, which is something we've seen again and again is just not present. And without restrictions and that responsibility the entire system is in a very real danger of succumbing to cartels, misinformation and outright exploitation of the consumer. Big business and government are the biggest, baddest cartel of our time, and exploitation takes place wherever possible. The progressive/labor movement of the early 20th century made the US/Western European populace more difficult to exploit, which is why they move their operations overseas to countries with weak labor laws, to find a more exploitable labor force. Well, except for the economic utopia of Deutschland. Zey are so industrious. Economics wasn't recognized as a legitimate science by Alfred Nobel (the economics prize was conjured up by a Swiss bank,) and it's dominated more by ideology than evidence. Reform in the field of economics is just as vital as reform in government. Classical/Neo-Classical economists tend to be right-wing ideologues more concerned with pushing the conservative agenda than studying the economy to find what works best. Evidence that laissez-faire can't work has been building exponentially thanks to more "hard" sciences like biology (humans are not fundamentally rational, selfish robots, for example.) They disregard the ample potential for corruption that has been recognized even by the laymen of the ancient world, and has been rife in every era in human history. The Randroids amongst them are the most delusional, ignoring entirely that all of human achievement up to this day has required cooperation and social cohesion, something which they consider the cardinal sin on Earth which must be eradicated. Capitalism is a better system than feudalism, no doubt, but that doesn't make it the final, ideal system of economy. .... This has been completely tangential to the thread subject, but worth saying, at least.

Never my problem, but actually you usually can't. The games won't let you continue until you've spent it all. (alhtough you can splurge it all on charisma or something, but still) In the ideal situation, Charisma would not be a dump stat. With really high Charisma, you should have people in towns lining up trying to get in your good graces in the hopes of getting a shot at sex with you, rough types trying to force themselves on you, and your animal magnetism should be like Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field, allowing you to rally even the most cowardly or skeptical individuals to lay down their lives for your noble cause or your petty whims.

Great mechanic? In theory it sounded good, but in practice it failed to account for 90% of the possible battlefield conditions. You've got tanks sitting there rapidly switching a sustained mode on and off, a mage using an AOE spell on a single enemy because the rest of the swarm moved to the tank but the target hasn't, a rogue using an attack that would deal triple damage to a stunned enemy right before the enemy is stunned, not that the warrior can stun anyone wasting stamina turning that sustained ability on and off...

I want to play a Monk character who spends his days transcribing ancient texts by hand, while wearing hair shirts and making pretzels for the orphans under his charge.

Particles which orbit characters' chosen forms of headgear.

Hey, I'm so open minded that friends sometimes makes jokes about being "too drafty in the attic" First impressions. I still don't like the combat (which was what turned me off in the demo originally). The setting I'm a bit indifferent to and the change in art direction doesn't bother me. Some of the companions are hilarious, I think I'm going to like Varric (sp?) and I like the occasional understated humour in the story. Only got the first 3 recruited yet though, I suspect Merrill (which I remember from the Dalish origin in DA:O, where she was fussing over a mirror that Duncan destroyed) has moved to the city, so I can probably also get her in my party now. Not sure if I want to swap out my sister for her though. Varric is DA2's saving grace. Of course, considering how restrictive DA2's class/party structure is, you can only bring Varric if you're playing a Warrior or Mage (all battles follow the standard MMO bossfight model.) Making things worse is that enemy aggro is immediately focused on the first party member they see, so if you like controlling the game's protagonist, and that protagonist isn't a Tank (the only thing warriors are for in DA,) you're going to suffer tactically (have to waste your initial actions diverting the threat to the tank, ruining a rogue or mage's opportunity to start on the right foot.) And Merrill. Just. Give up on her as a character, it's going to get bad, and it's going to be fast. Exponentially fast decline. If they intentionally wrote her that way, they did a good job. If they wanted people who aren't 12 year old girls or "bronies" to like her, they failed utterly. In her introduction she's capable of recognizing sarcasm. Not ten minutes later she will be incapable of understanding it even when slowly explained as if to a small child. Yes, from what I've seen, the Steam prices outside of NA are ludicrously inflated, but you will not likely regret it. Gameplay is a more polished/intuitive Arx Fatalis or Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, the story is interesting, the setting is novel, if a bit too familiar visually (you will swear you're in the middle of an Edwardian City 17 at some points,) and YOU CAN SUMMON SWARMS OF RATS TO DEVOUR YOUR FOES WHOLE! Bonus feature: no corpse for patrolling foes to discover. That or they'll discover A SWARM OF RATS DEVOURING THEIR COWORKERS WHOLE. And when the rats are done with the first guy? I think you can guess what happens next.

I didn't care that much for bards until I used one (a bard-equivalent, anyway, sings songs to buff allies, debuff and banish enemies,) to utterly destroy the Lovecraftian-eldritch abomination endboss with THE POWER OF ROCK in a game. Directly, as in the song did the killing, not the buffed party. So yeah, let's listen to some songs.

I felt like that after Skyrim, the game was supposed to last me a year but I just blitzed it like an addict for three or four months, seen it all now. Also yay for Sawyer's mod, it makes the game insanely difficult at some points Skyrim burns out a lot faster than Vegas. Replayed NV many times, hit Skyrim once and was done. The landscape's beautiful and all, but the gameplay is bland and the writing is... well. You know. Beth's philosophy of letting or even forcing a player not to RP and to do absolutely everything with one character is one of the worst aspects of their game design. I know, right?! Turns out, I asked MCA and apparently they had to nerf sneak somehow for memory reasons (it's on the twatters somewhere,) don't know why they'd have to do that on PC.

The Walking Dead, Borderlands 2, Super Robot Wars Z2, and Dishonored IF IT WILL LOAD. Trying not to do another run of New Vegas with the latest iteration of JSawyer's JSawyer mod. I've already got several hundred hours clocked in there, and the whole "steam friends freaking out about your NV play time" thing is wearing thin.

Romero's involvement is being hidden due to THE GAME THAT SHALL NOT BE NAMED. I backed it because I like the idea, which is essentially sci-fi future professional LARPers travelling to various worlds to play assigned roles who get stranded due to some unknown cataclysm. There's nothing I want to see in a game more than science (SCIENCE!) vs. magic.

Isn't that the future-prediction device from South Park?

I assume the Kurdish issue has more to do with whatever resources may lie in Turkish Kurdistan than desperation to keep Kurds around, but I still don't understand the modern world's insistence that all current national borders (you know, the ones drawn by Western powers with no understanding of the tribal and cultural complexities of the regions they're setting the borders of,) be preserved no matter the cost. It's a bit of a tangent, but look at a country like Somaliland. It was an independent nation that willingly joined together with Somalia after colonial rule ended, and after Somalia's collapse it went back to being an independent, functioning state, but most of the world refuses to recognize it as such, despite the fact that it is a stable, functioning democracy untouched by the chaos of Somalia proper.

Yeah, exactly. I don't always understand why people get a dog (or any pet) that they don't seem to have the time/energy for. I tried researching breeds of dogs and their common temperaments and that was when I realized I probably didn't have what it take since I'd want one of the larger, more active ones. My sister-in-law has moved out of CA, up north now, with a much much bigger yard/house vs. what she had here, so I bet that's helped. Their dog wasn't huge, but it was extremely hyper (some kind of wolf/husky looking breed). Having more than a small, fenced in suburban yard to run around in is probably heaven for him. Unfortunately, most people are simply content to think "a dog's a dog's a dog," and that it's just another showpiece of their economic success. Sure, they might love their dog, but that doesn't mean they understand the dog or its needs. I couldn't tell you how many project irrational beliefs on dog behaviors, i.e. seeing whimpering submission as an admission of "guilt" for a "recognized infraction," as though the dog "knows" that rummaging through the trash is "against the rules." Animal hoarders are a prime example of people who have an overabundance of "love" but zero understanding of the needs of the animals they "love."

Googled Hadi Tajik. DAAAAAAYUM girl, you lookin' fine! B-bu-buh-but regulation is the problem, not laissez-faire! *crayon scribbles over the portions of Adam Smith where he says government regulation and taxation of the rich are vital for capitalism to work* RON PAUL 2012! Lemme show you my sweet Friedrich Hayek tramp stamp, bro!

Dogs with high-energy are generally bred for work of some sort. A lot of people don't get (then again, a lot of people don't get a lot of things,) why their dog tears up the house while they're out; it's because the dogs were meant to be out chasing foxes, herding sheep, mauling enemy soldiers, and all the other purposes we'd bred them for in ye olde tymes. Example: A Dalmatian can run about 50 miles a day. Every day. So long as it's well fed, anyway. To keep that amount of energy locked up inside, all day, every day, save for maybe a 15-30 minute walk? Of course they're going to go nuts and destroy things. When getting a dog it's vital for the safety of your furniture and the dog's quality of life to do real research on the breed and what behaviors it was bred for.

Communism, as Marx defined it, was a small-government economic system in which every person owns an equal share in every aspect of production. The ultimate goal was (contrary to right-wing beliefs,) to liberate people as individuals from the wage slavery of capital so that they could individually pursue intellectual, philosophical and ethical empowerment and improvement (what he dubbed "essence.") His fatal flaw was naivety, a failure to recognize human nature, in believing that the Socialist revolutionaries would be incorruptible and disinterested as he was (the man could have been a successful businessman or academic, but he chose to live the life of a secular ascetic, a choice which cost the lives of four of his seven children.) The old saying that power corrupts has yet to be disproven.

I haven't seen a single person say that Bioware-style "illusion of choice" situations are the definition of "gray" or "morally ambiguous" choices. There is zero threat of the 21st century Bioware being the model for Obsidian's new original IP.

So you want a fat, perverse, possibly pedophilic NPC to harass the player constantly? With the exceptional creative team behind it, PE should not have to fall back so hard on blasé references for comedy. Besides, I don't see a lot of crossover between late 90s LoZ players and late 90s CRPG players. The fantasy of LoZ is lighthearted and child-oriented, I do not believe PE will be the same, like its IE predecessors.

I am eager to repel the Norse invaders from my territories in Britain.