Drowsy Emperor

Manufacturer info What is the Denuvo Anti-Tamper solution? Denuvo Anti-Tamper technology prevents the debugging, reverse engineering and changing of executable files to strengthen the security of games. It is not a DRM solution, but rather, Denuvo Anti-tamper protects DRM solutions, such as Origin Online Access or the Steam license management system, from being circumvented. What is the difference between DRM and Anti-Tamper? A Digital Rights Management (DRM) system binds the game to a legitimate user account and allows the game to be played whenever and wherever the consumer wants to download and execute the game. Anti-Tamper stops the reverse engineering and debugging of the DRM solution, but has no effect or limitation on the legitimate consumer. Anti-Tamper is completely transparent to legitimate game buyers and does not in any way impose activation limits, install drivers, or require a gamer to be "always on." Fifa and Lords of the Fallen use it and have not been cracked so far. It is likely that all further EA games will use it.

Its a Bioware game, of course you're going to save the world.

Saints Row IV. Its my first encounter with the SR series. Its okay, like old GTA used to be but with even worse driving physics. Dated graphics and presentation, a lot of juvenile humor. 7/10 so far

Apparently its a new DRM by the same people that made SecuROM. I guess that makes it a bargain bin purchase. A pity

Its the usual anime lemonade in a period costume. It doesn't matter whether its WWII or demons from hell.

http://www.pcgamer.com/elite-dangerous-will-no-longer-support-an-offline-mode/ Elite turns out to be online only after consistently promising an offline mode. Lol. I just saw Elerond's post above. ..It was dumb of them to promise a feature that certain people value highly and then backtrack on it.

Yep. What you think is propaganda is probably just lifting inspiration from real world events. A lot of things in Frank Herbert's Dune mirror the cold war, oil, islam but that doesn't make the book about any of those things per se.

Then don't play it and don't give them your money. Personally I don't think they are as deep thinkers as you make them out to be. The way Gaider blatantly pushes for homosexual romances because he himself is one pretty much tells me the extent of their political sophistication.

That would be an improvement. Anyone else find it amusing that reviews are complaining about the story of DA:I? Where were these complaints about ME2, ME3, DA2 and yes DA:O? And does this possibly mean I will like DA:I story? Also spoilers the villain is: I doubt it, their standards are likely to be far lower than yours.

Just look in DA2, they never show any good side of religious folks, they are all extremists. Religion is bad since DA2. Templar - hate Mages to the extreme with no good reason, especially if The Warden is a Mage and mages who help against the recent war, the Blight. The religious military order want to take over politic of Kirkwal under Meredith Chantry - their hipocrisy is to the extreme, do you see any decent priests in the game? Chantry feel threatened with Qunari religion and conspire to eliminate the religion from Kirkwal. The grand priest just close her eyes and ears about everything that happen Mages - the one who are religious are abomination, Wynne (in DA:O) and Anders are both abomination. Are there any good mages other than Bethany? And because of being opressed by religion making them going into dark art to against religious people. The religious mage who blow up the church Qunari - going rampage on a foreign city in a foreign country who provide them shelter and home because someone stole their holy book. Then want to force everyone to convert into their religion. What is the good side of Qunari? None shown. City Elves - killing peoples with poison gas and want to blame it to Qunari because of many Elves converted into the Qun. Again it is because of religion Meredith - religion justify the War on Terror or Crusade against Mages because the act of one person who blow up the Church. She even going crazy with religious chantings And because of religion the world is turning upside down. The God didn't care, He even left and created The Blight in the first place to wipe out His creation, so all those religious peoples are just deluded fanatics Religion portrayed as extremist is a common theme in the US and Canada. They can't put a preacher (and its usually a christian one) in a movie if he isn't a frothing at the mouth lunatic, paedophile or somehow deeply flawed. You should know better than to expect a positive portrayal of religion from a company that pushes LGBT agenda through their game. Visceral anti-religiousness, gay "rights", preaching tolerance while suppressing all views but their own - that's all core liberal policy.... beyond Bioware.

These are not fetch quests.

Nope. IE games had their share of trite quests, but they had no mechanics of this type. Sticking a flag in a pre-defined location, going around closing gates and other repetitive mechanics of this type littered around the world to pose as content weren't part of those games. I think they're bad for immersion and negatively impact replay value. People do them for the in game bonuses they grant (munchkinism) and out of OCD but not because they really like them. I'm not saying the game is crap because they're included but they didn't need those design "shortcuts".

They don't have the money to pull off animation convincingly in a game of that size.

That's how it turned out, yes. I still think they have potential but are stuck too far into the risk minimizing business side of things. If you're not going to lead in terms of design, ideas etc. then you're going to follow. Which is why you can see more external influence in Bioware games than Bioware shaping the RPG scene. Following MMO's, AAA games of the day like AssCreed sounds more like trying to stay afloat than anything else.

150 hours of gameplay don't grow on trees. What we have here is a form of project management triangle. Matrix: 1) Lots of content + high variety <-> long development time (people complain about outdated graphics). 2) Lots of content + short development time <-> low variety (people complain about repetitiveness). 3) High variety + short development time <-> not enough content (people complain about the game being too short). See how developers can never win? Unless that tree is Baldur's Gate 2. lots of content + high variety + made in two years 3D won't catch up by 2055, or, possibly, never Bottom line, 30 hours filled with unique content > 70 hours slogging through the same crap (a lesson JRPG's never learned)

This game has the potential to be one of the best games ever made: If they give the procedural universe adequate context. Regardless, it made my heart jump for joy, to see what used to be real sci fi in a game.

What I immediately dislike about the game, although I will reserve further judgment until I get to try it, is the amount of pointless AssCreed/Far Cry style busywork. Going from one area to next, scavenger hunt style, to trigger some arbitrary mechanic/bonus never seemed like intelligent or involved gameplay to me, but rather filler material that's easy to copy paste over the entirety of the game. So you get an enormous world map "full of things to do", only those things are all copies of a dozen templates that all play out the same way. Stick a flag here, look through a telescope there, blah blah, rinse repeat fifty times over. Its easily made content to substitute real individually crafted quests and area events. At least, that's how it tends to play out in games of the type. The Far Cry 3 map was a perfect example. It was the exact same thing all over with a bit of differing terrain to offer the impression of a "large open world".

He was bullied into apologizing, since he's obviously not used to being under that sort of hate fueled pressure. The poor man actually ended up thinking it was his fault, judging by the way he broke down. They just chose the opportunity to tear him down, and considering that it started from his colleagues, there was probably no small amount of jealousy (over his involvement in the project) in play.

... I don't know what you're trying to get across. Pausing makes it tactical. Lol. Pausing makes it tactical? What? Having various, legitimate options to use in combat makes it tactical, because they allow you to approach the same situation in a different manner. That's tactics. He's pointing out the obvious - the MMO combat isn't tactical, because its shallow in the number of things you can do and almost everything you do in it will allow you to win. This is exemplified in DAI videos where players routinely leave 3 party members under AI control, while their own input boils down to spamming one ability after the other until all of them are under cooldown. Using a potion from a limited supply before a party member dies seems to be the height of DAI "tactics". So, it makes sense to ditch such a simplistic sistem, that is neither real action nor real tactical, in favor of either of those two.

Chainmail bikinis are a kitsch fantasy art staple, derivative from oriental motifs (like a Turkish harem) in classic art. There's a place for that too, what's silly is the judgmental attitude towards them. That would be like pretending several decades of Conan comics, Frazzetta's art, to mention but a few, never happened. No one seemed to care at the time, when it was an underground thing, but now its suddenly a hanging offense. Its ****ing fantasy for the XXth century, the way scenes from a harem in a classical painting were for a XIX century city gentleman who would go to a gallery to see them and would raise less of a fuss at exposed boobage than what the xhamster generation is raising now. All it does is show what a potent mix a lacking education and ideology driven thinking are. Let me drive my point across. Its fantasy, thus it doesn't have to conform to reality. Its obvious intent is to convey an atmosphere, not to offend somebody, thus while they can still choose to be offended, its really a malicious choice on their part.

I dunno, I never get bored of curry or beer or vanilla flavor ice cream. I don't need a different variety each time. /poor excuse. One thing often missed out by those who talk of 'generic' and 'cliches' is that a story (imho) stands 5% on what it's about (synopsis) and 95% on how it is told (delivery). In the latter area DA:O does very well. Outstandingly well by game standards. Another thing often missed out is that DA:O was probably not about the big evil orc and dragon invasion, but the much more sinister Morrigan angle. Flemeth planned the whole thing by Morrigan's own words, and they care little for the Blight. They want the soul of the Old God. That's why your PC refusing the request and therefore dying at the end is a huge ending with vast cutscenes and epilogues. If it were not for the rape and pillage of the DA franchise in rencent comics and cartoons, this could have been one of the biggest plot twists/reveals in recent gaming history. Sadly I suspect Morrigan will make some silly cameo and kiss the inquisitor for old times' sake, but that lovely plot hook will never see the developement it hinted at and which - if my reading is correct - the franchise would so desperately deserve. My perspective was different. At the time they were looking for a way out of restrictive and expensive intellectual IP rights (restrictive they may have been, but they still made Baldur's Gate 2 with them... so whatever). That's fine. They had their own money to do with as they pleased within the other limits of game development. And they went out of their way to make the setting as generic an epic fantasy as possible. That was the first letdown. Now I wasn't expecting something as alienating (to the masses, or so the money people say) as Torment but honestly, there are a lot of possibilities in between. The second letdown was the story. Not only was the setting basically Greyhawk, the story they came up with was as archetypal fantasy as you can possibly get. Individual segments of it had some flavor but overall it was pretty underwhelming. This was Bioware playing it safe to the absolute maximum.* It stunk of the money people calling all the shots, railroading everything into a product that would be all things to all people. Another Peter Jackson's LOTR. I know that as game developers they read fantasy RPG books, pnp systems and settings, watch movies for inspiration etc. etc. I know they know what a wealth of ideas begging for in game adaptation are available. There's 30+ years of material just waiting to be used. DnD and LOTR, to name the basic influences behind DA are the most vapid, most abused and most deserving of the trash heap of history of them all. And I hoped, and keep on hoping that we could move beyond them. Bioware seemed like the company that could do that. There were even moments of that materializing (regardless of the outcome) like Jade Empire, or the potential Mass Effect had. But Dragon Age never moved beyond that point and they don't seem to have an idea of what to do with the series, it just keeps on plodding along in the shadow of ME which at least knows what it is, even if at times, that isn't very much at all. *Its still Shakespeare compared to the likes of Elder Scrolls, Gothic and other "there's a story there?" type games, that's not even a comparison worth making.

Haven't seen that, don't wanna. Terrible romance and "I like whatever you have in your pants" companions haven't been necessary to bash a Bioware game into the ground for a while now. They're usually just the final nails in the coffin.

Maybe they couldn't. It's people who write stories, not companies. AFAIK most if not all of BG2 story was written by Lukas Kristjanson. For DA:O he wrote "Leliana's Song" DLC (a nice but very short module) and he also co-authored "A Paragon of Her Kind" quest. Which is probably why Orzammar subplot is considered the strongest part of the game story-wise. P.S. Notably, almost nobody has heard of Kristjanson but everyone knows Hepler and Gaider. It seems that the ability to troll the community doesn't necessarily coincide with writing talent. Interesting about Lukas. He's senior writer now on DAI. We'll see if he's still got it soon enough

Good luck to anyone trying to defend DAO "originality". There are some aspect of that game that deserve praise but story and setting aren't among them.

That game is really pretty, a pity its another Diablo clone. The character looks exactly like Nightmare from Soul Calibur by the way.