Drowsy Emperor

Witcher 2. I'm in Flotsam now. It seems they had a lot of money to throw around but a dearth of ideas. Inexplicably, W2 makes mistakes the first one didn't, like excessive railroading, borderline unusable inventory system, quicktime events, excessive cutscenes. Its a blockbuster syndrome. Too many characters are introduced then say too little, then they're gone...

Hmm, youre the second person to mention this. I think it was Hassat Hunter that mentioned being ~16 hours in and there being little to no combat. Bummer. Little combat you say - auto win for me! The original Divine Divnity was just a Diablo clone with more interactivity so I never looked into the series further.

I love the music on that small in game clip!

Could be, just like any other subscription based game these days, but Wildstar is clearly build from ground up for ex- and current wow players and there was, what, over twelve million of them at it's prime? If Wildstar succeeds luring a good chunk of them over they won't be having to worry about going F2P anytime soon. But if that doesn't happen and if ESO also starts losing subbers, I wouldn't be surprised if subsciption based games would be a thing of the past soon. I don't think anyone is luring a chunk of players anywhere these days, some of the paint has worn off from MMO's after WoW... especially with subscriptions. The thing that stuck me first when I was looking at the wildstar website is that the game seemed geared towards younger players.... who may be the last social group to have regular subscription money available. But then, what do I know.

It was the last RPG that brought something new to the table and that I really enjoyed. Funny thing is, I can't seem to bring myself to play Witcher 2. I have a nagging feeling they ruined the spontaneity of the first one and went for hollywood putting production values above everything.

My girlfriend is playing W1 right now and shes enjoying it. She's also trying to bone anything that has a pulse in the game... so much for misogyny.

Think that one is going to go F2P in under a year.

Now I'm dying to hear the other four and whatever adjectives are left.

Epic post by Volo, someone sig that ^ The expansion of MMO gameplay is a really annoying thing because it kills interesting decision making during combat. All games can be reduced to numbers, but the numbers game is so painfully obvious in an MMO it kills the actual joy of role playing and imagination. No positional tactics, no reflex requirements, no way to gimp the system in creative ways, just an endless grind in your "designated area" in one of the few "designated roles". I remember when I was being crushed as a noob in WoW duels how suprising it was that my character, just a few levels beneath the opposition actually had no chance, zero, nada, to win. There was nothing to do in actual combat that could change the outcome, his numbers were bigger than my numbers and if I wanted to win I had to have bigger numbers than he did which just means more in game grinding and then he'd be beat... by numbers. Being the kind of guy that uses a calculator to write "boob" I gave up on the World of Numbers and went to play something else instead.

It starts out with the premise of a haunted house story and plays like it too, only there is no haunting or payoff for the tension.

I'm anticipating this one as well.

In ME 2 you could customize everything apart from the important things. They were either blue or red and it didn't matter which pill you picked cos you weren't going to wonderland anyway.

Actually being weaned on the Myth series I rather like tactical positioning. Selecting formations was half the fun of that game. The other half was watching the enemy butchered as he charged my three deep line of braveheart berserkers, while dwarves lob explosive beer everywhere and gibs fly in all directions and the narrator, in a gleeful voice exclaims: Casualties! bwaahahahha. Now that was a manly man's teenage fantasy game!

I played through Gone Home in a single sitting. It started off well but went downhill from there. For those who don't mind spoilers, the gist is this: girl comes home from a trip to find her parents and her little sister gone. So you look around the house to find out what happened. Her parents are typical middle class family, the father is going through a work crisis and the mother is having an affair with a co-worker. They're actually on an anniversary trip so their story ends up on a semi positive note. The little sister is a lesbian and the entire story revolves around her and her girlfriend with the typical "mom and dad don't understand me" crap so she runs away with her. That's it. There is a little flirting with the occult but its irrelevant overall. If it was a movie it would be a routine crappy drama you'd forget in an instant. Since its not a movie, its a crap game. But you're not really gaming since there are no puzzles, so its just crap. The story, the sole motivator is bland and banal. Its the type of game that critics love to wax lyrical about because it pretends at being significant and deep, when in fact its not. Don't waste your time on this. 1/5 stars

What he used to have were some chemical weapons that were given to him or that he bought from the US and used during the war with Iran. Apart from the obvious hypocrisy of accusing him of having something they sold him in the first place, the fact that he had them at some point doesn't lead to conclusion that he would actually use them against the US. By the time the US attacked Iraq he had nothing. The lie was twofold: 1) He had and was producing WMD's in significant quantities 2) Those WMD's are a threat to the US and the "free world". Volo makes some relevant points The whole justification that Western media lies because of the Iraq invasion just gets tiresome and definitely doesn't represent the reality of the state of the veracity of most events the Western media raises Saddam used chemical weapons against the Kurds and the Iranians. There is NO doubt he had them in the past and was prepared to use them in past conflicts. The misinformation that most Western countries intelligence services had were the fact that he still had them. Yes the wrong information was given to various governments and this was used as part of the justification for the second invasion of Iraq But this doesn't negate all the subsequent stories around global events that the Western media brings to our attention Zora, Drowsy, Vals and Sarex you guys really need to stop using the Iraq invasion as a valid reason for why we cannot trust anything the West says. Personally I check multiple sources when it comes to global events and I can corroborate what I say and believe. But I admit I don't use RT as a source of information as I don't trust it in any regards. You're in fact glossing over everything I said while whitewashing what happened in Iraq. At least a 100,000 died there for nothing and probably many more. This is the sort of crime that international courts were supposedly built for. Yet no one ever faced a court of law. Of course, the argument that western intelligence agencies had "misinformation" is rubbish, as if such huge institutions base their opinion on what the local grocery keeper says and not the collective knowledge of many people. The WMD's were a lie necessary because there was nothing bombastic that could be attributed to Saddam to get the war going. The Iraq argument is the perfect argument that western media is in service of the state's foreign policy because its airtight, a lie of such epic proportions that was impossible to hide. There were many such lies. The "Racak massacre" in Kosovo (featuring KLA combatants slain in combat dressed up as civilians), the "Srebrenica genocide" (where the victims of "genocide" rose from the dead to vote in subsequent elections), the "Serbian concentration camps" in Bosnia. All of these were outright fabrications by the western media. Thankfully, not everyone is willing to be a part of it.

This doesn't really mean anything, there were probably a hundred people who had reason to do this. It could be political but it doesn't have to be.

That's why I bought a mechanical keyboard, except these are nowhere near the standards that IBM used to have. These guys still make the original Model M (in the same factory) http://www.pckeyboard.com I use one at work and still use my 1993 IBM Model M at home. How well do those work to game on though (thinking Unreal Tournament and the likes)? I've been considering a mechanical keyboard for a while (though probably not a Model M because the noise those make would make me rather unpopular at work. I used to have a colleague who had one and had to ask him to stop typing while I was on the phone with him because I couldn't understand a word he said. Also I prefer keyboards without slanted keys, much better ergonomically, though still fairly rare, alas) Well I'm looking to buy one, used even, but I'd use it for typing and plug in my 6GV2 when I want to play something. There are those in between Cherry MX switches like brown and red but there aren't any in Serbia so I never did have the opportunity to try them out. Here we only have the Razer and Steelseries keyboards, probably the bottom feeders of the mechanical keyboard world.

Bows were more effective in the game than melee due to the AD&D rules/implementation, can't remember which. Especially in BG 1 where you could kill most things by outfitting the whole party with ranged weapons.

Yes it took a lot of work to position the rogue and then they missed more often than not and ended up as a stain on the carpet.

How about mages wear armor? No silly dresses, no cowl and no silly hats. Just plate mail and chain mail. There is no reason a mage shouldn't be able to wear armor all they do is babble and wave their arms around and chain mail isn't exactly a straitjacket. Clerics wear what they please and they're another type of mage. Everything is a contrivance for the sake of "balance". I think, since the game isn't really about specialized class roles all that much they could have just made the system classless with skill trees so you could just pick and choose. Want a mage that can wear armor and cast spells? Buy it. Want a rogue that can fight like a champ? Buy it. Problem solved. It always made more sense anyway.

Besides, if we track the rogue to the beginning of the stereotype in swords and sorcery, Conan, the character is basically a cunning warrior. What separates him from knights is his self serving attitude, not a particular skill set.

One of their problems is their approach to rogues isn't what most people associate with rogues. The classes are Warrior, Also Warrior, and Mage. I think they have to compensate somehow for the traditional weaknesses of the class. In BGII it didn't matter that the thief was so specialized since you had 5 other characters to make up for it. If you want to make the PC feel powerful as a thief you basically have to make him into a warrior, to lessen his dependence on other classes in direct confrontation. I wouldn't mind getting owned by the mobs as a thief but I imagine the imaginary average gamer would. After the third botched backstab attempt they'd bury their controller in the telly and frothing rage would erupt on the forums.

I don't know. Entropy in the first game had the ability to summon zombies, and it certaintly wasn't part of the blood magic. But who knows. Forgot about that. But weren't the blood mages in DA2 summing undead on mass? Also this is mage gear in DA:I? I think its silly in a good way. No one needs more cowled wizards with mystic runes all over, looking like they couldn't find better garments than someone's curtains. Really walking around with a cowl and a long robe there'd be more dead wizards due to tripping and hitting their heads on the pavement or being blindsided by donkey carts than due to enemy action.

I like the game, but I had some of the same problems as you did, and I completely agree regarding the frankly insane fanbase. A good portion of the game's difficulty is just understanding what the heck you're doing - both in terms of gameplay mechanics, as well as actual controls, neither of which the game really helps you out at all with. Once you "master" the controls - master them as well as they can be mastered, anyways: really, sometimes it seems as though they're bad just for the sake of being bad - then it's just a matter of fighting each unique enemy either randomly succeeding the first time or not and learning to understand them in subsequent attempts. There is some measure of skill required, which I guess is something...but... For that reason, I actually liked the PVP more at times. Except a lot of people are just terrible at PVP (or the game in general, perhaps), which is not so fun when you can wait upwards of 15 minutes in between fights...or longer, depending on the time of day. It's a lot more fun when you actually fight someone close to your skill level...even if you lose. It's not that the game is necessarily bad...it just could've been a whole lot better if it was polished a bit and some sort of very basic encyclopedia explaining game mechanics or something was present in game...never mind all the PVP problems. In other news, XFX is going to RMA my video card. I'm on a $10 backup card that is...actually performing way beyond my expectations. Video card tiers are so bogus, in my opinion. For $10, I should be barely able to play anything with a decent FPS, even on low settings. Instead, my gaming habits are almost completely unchanged. Sure, I have to turn down some settings, but none of the *important* ones, like draw distance or anything. Quite frankly, I think the way video cards are priced is a bunch of baloney...this just further cements my opinion I'll never pay more than $150 *at absolute most* for a video card, and I'll probably stay close to the $80-$100 range in the future. Bah. I understand that a lot of players today feel the need to move away from what I would call "fictional gameplay", meaning you mash the buttons, cool things happen and you win. You get the illusion that you're beating a challenge whereas in fact its not so much that you're winning but that you can't actually lose. I presume that game companies, over time, discovered that the majority of the newer, more casual players who are a very large, if not the largest source of money now dislikes the way old games were built. Basically many older games were a case of trial and error. You're supplied limited information and failure is practically guaranteed at first until you eventually find out what you actually have to do at which point you more or less breeze through it. Naturally this is frustrating for people who aren't habitual gamers and are simply likely to give up. So they dropped the various requirements, like having to learn weapon timings, bosses telegraph attacks more or deal less damage etc. to make sure the player doesn't stop and get stuck because stopping = failure = frustration. But Dark Souls just does it the old way through and through. Which is somewhat unnecessary and extreme since the game would have been still quite challenging even with a good tutorial and a bit more forgiving combat.

What makes Severance worth playing?