Drowsy Emperor

Um that's exactly the sort of conformism driving everything BW does. But, at least they know their customers.

Yes, there is zero flexibility in Civ V. Same research order in every game, same policy trees, warfare is utterly suboptimal with the large hapiness penalties and with the post BNW science penalty per every city after the fourth one the only way to play the game is a 4 city empire going for science with a skeleton army for defence (exploiting the inept AI)/ I've seen some high level MP games and it looks depressing. Everyone sticking with their 4 city empire, vast parts of the map unsettled, no interaction between players. They manage to make a 4x game where eXpand and eXterminate aren't viable strategies.

"Best game ever. The romances were so well done I even kissed my monitor ?" -BruceVC "Too much romance and not enough fighting in tunnels" - Monte Carlo "Better than Twitcher3" - Hoon Ding ... "kissed my mother's brother" would be more appropriate, it is Bioware after all

I should add : Legend of Grimrock II 8/10 BUT - its certainly better than the first game, about as good as a dungeon romp gets, but like the first game, I tired of the gameplay quickly and stopped around half way. So it could be a 7/10 game on account of not even bothering to finish it but I feel they put too much effort into it for me to dump it in the "barely above average" category

I'm a bit lazy to follow the template so I'll just give /10 scores. Alien Isolation 8/10 (decent, but flawed) Wasteland 3/10 (first impression, there'll be no final score) Divinity Original Sin 8/10 (first impression, game in progress) Civilization beyond Earth (6/10, mediocre) South Park SoT 7/10 (nice, but runs dry towards the end) Endless Legend 7/10 nice flavor and graphics, but the gameplay is boring Shadowrun Dragonfall 9/10 (realistically, its an 8/10 game, but it was too good a nostalgia ride to lower the score)

Now that was a game I thought had potential. A bit more money and finesse with the combat design (and the design in general) and it would have been one of the best games in the last decade.

That's because it is. I liked it up until the ending though.

That's some grimdark dialog right there.

I could never figure out why arena shooting gave way to tactical shooters. Now CS is a really a great game in it own right, and deserved all the popularity it got but CoD is mechanically a pos. And it turned out to be the preferred multiplayer shooter experience of everyone and their uncle. Why anyone would prefer to spend their time crouching to regain health while staring at muddy textures to precisely propelling a flying saw to rebound from a map obstacle and cut a target's head off, while jumping in mid air between two buildings is beyond me.

I don't know if it will be dumb but there appear to be some extreme abilities in that game. There are also hard counters in TF2 and impossible situations for any of the classes but there are no "insta-win" special abilities. Even the medic invincibility is manageable. I don't like ultimate abilities that give you easy ways to cheese your opponent.

Its called the Brazzers treatment.

Blizzard has also always been about making loads of money and party based tactical RPG's in 2014 are about as fringe as you can get. Not saying it'll never happen but I just don't see it happening any time soon.

Not my type of game but it does look cool. You know, there's a lot of something for nothing in that video. In TF2 you have to sweat quite a bit to become a good rocket jumper with the soldier, to bounce enemies around, etc. Its not an easy skill to master. Here, the rocket launcher character has a jetpack that they can presumably activate with a single button and something that looks like an ultimate ability where you basically spam an area with a dozen rockets. Its a symptom of games giving up what used to be skill based gameplay in favor of whatever makes you feel cool with the press of a single button.

Err, Blizzard has never made a game of that type. They aren't likely to either.

Not to mention that stylized graphics almost always wind up being significantly less taxing on the hardware than striving for photorealism. Yes, that's true. I just wish they weren't so obnoxiously "positive" by design. As in: if you compare the original Starcraft zerg and the Starcraft II zerg, the latter look almost cute. As in WoW cute. The look of the first Starcraft, taking from its WH40K inspiration, is rather dark, almost horror like. The second one is practically WoW in space. Cartoon graphics are like comics, you can use them to convey any atmosphere you like and the one they're predominantly used for is this extremely colorful, shiny, "everything is awesome" look which is so obviously made to appeal to everyone and ends up somewhat.. bland. I should be impressed by Overwatch maps, they look very nicely designed... but I've seen all of it before already, across different games. The character designs are basically standard superhero action figures, muscleheads, chicks with huge ****, thin freaky guys etc. etc.

They just rape you until you're jumping at your own shadow. I remember playing UT with some high difficulty bots on turbo mode. A person standing next to me couldn't make out what was happening on the screen and I had to switch to switch my brain to some sort of primal mode to get the reactions I needed because thinking was slowing me down. It was like a caffeine overload. Twitching after a game too. Later I tried the game back on regular speed and I was thinking... why is this all in slow motion now

I never found any of the ID games particularly hard. Dunno where that's coming from. I guess they are hard if you're used to the modern "play on autopilot" games. There's just a bit of trial and error as with all IE games.

cartoon graphics last longer without looking old that said, there is an infinite variety in the way they can be done and I don't like the way Blizz does theirs either in this game the thing I don't like, judging by the movie, is how the weapons feel, which is a bit too much like toys TF2 weapons may be more mundane but they're damn satisfying to use. UT had fantasy weapons but they were quite menacing. These look a bit too much like... pew pew

because you can get away with it pausing the game really comes into play when you have to manage your party, which only happens when they're in real danger and you need to optimize to win Why optimize when you can just barge through it without consequence? I don't think I practically ever took control of squad mates in ME. In KOTOR and NWN, you could auto attack your way to victory. etc. etc. Bioware combat hasn't been about that for a long time. The first DA was the only time they've done that in years and they backpedaled on it as soon as DA2.

Its growing older and being worn down by repetition. On the other hand, one of the reasons the thrill is "gone" is because games became a big business and there is less experimentation, personal input and obvious joy in their design. In some of the older games its apparent the designers had a free hand and did things because they could and because they genuinely found them fun. All the in jokes in Fallout 2 for example. Notice I said some, because there was a lot of "made by a committee", "made to make money off a better game's success" etc. junk back then, as there is now. When you get older its hard to swallow an impersonal product made by ticking design check-boxes, known player hooks and aggressive marketing because you see it for what it is. The Shadowrun expansion and the first Witcher were the last RPGs where I could relate to the game. The second Witcher is a prime example of everything I wrote above. Made to succeed by suffocating you with its bombastic production values, screaming ARE YOU IMPRESSED in your ear all the time trying so hard to be larger than life... without the low key humor and down to earth approach of the first one. When they actually made Geralt pretty and gave you the option to do change his hairstyle... I knew the series was done. Bioware is the same deal. Everything made to elicit the: OMG SO EPIC! DUDE DID U SEE THAT???! response. No its not ****ing epic, its the same **** you've been peddling for the last ten years in a universe you made so purposefully generic it makes Greyhawk look good. Its not just role playing games either. I'm currently playing Civ IV and V, and V will awe you with its production values until a few games in you realize its a mere shadow of the design genius the civilization series once was. Civ V is an ingenious product though, that will pull you in and make you feel good and clever and let you wiin and make the designers a ton of money. But making a good product and a good game is not the same thing.

The combat looks like button mashing crap and enemies seem to take forever to die. When will they understand that its impossible to transform pared down RPG combat that hinges on a very limited set of attacks and abilities (with damage numbers jumping out above characters lol) into a fluid action game?

Team Fortress 2 with less arena shooter and more moba ability spam Obviously they couldn't let Titan go down the drain without getting some money out of it

You do know where the name came from right? The creator had done a bunch of failed games and FF was his last try, if it failed he was leaving the industry, his Final Fantasy. Which turned out to be wildly successful so it didn't turn out the way he thought. That's the joke Well, now its a joke

And the japs really need to move their teenagers beyond gay version of James Dean. A part of me wants to say the graphics are pretty but I'm so worn out on pretty graphics that all I see is tedious running around.

For the fifteenth "extremely final" time eh