Pidesco

Well, they're both games where you follow a linear story through different chapters, with a lead character you created by picking a class, atributes and physical characteristics. Furthermore, you go through both games picking up a motley crew of adventurers, with whom you talk to further each of the character's plots. Also, you go around doing quests, mostly of the fetch or kill variety which usually can be completed in either a good or evil fashion. Also, the combat follows a formula where you take the characters you picked to follow you plus the lead character to fight against all manner of beasties like ghouls, skeletons, spiders, orcs and many humans, who may be thieves, or bandits, or evil priests or whatever. It should be noted these fights are somewhat tactical and follow a set of arbitrary rules known as Dungeons & Dragon where the classes and attributes of the characters involved determine the outcome of battles. Finally, both games take place in the same fictional universe. Completely different games. It's like comparing Civilization and Halo.

NWN2 is completely and utterly different from Baldur's Gate. There's hardly any relation to gameplay at all. It is completely wrong to compare the two. Are you kidding?

I'd first figure out a way to predict what kind of ability a given person is going to get.

They want to make her look like an ice queen, obviously, and her hair held back helps that.

What the hell happened to Niki? Also, the number of hot blondes in this show is getting freaky.

Forkin' A!

There already is drunken fighting, you simply take the right feat and get drunk... Yes, but not like that. I'm not just talking about a feat that affects your stats. I'm talking about getting drunk affecting the way you inflict damage, and how many enemies you can handle. For example, if your fighting drunk against one enemy it would allow your unpredictable movements to inflict more damage, but with less accuracy, while doing more damage. There could be a synergy between alcohol and strong style. However if you were to fight drunk in group style against a bunch of enemies, it would originate huge penalties due to your lowered reflexes.

I thought the combat was a lost opportunity. Just allowing style and magic combos would have made the combat a lot deeper and more engaging. Also, synergies between potion effects and styles used, would have been great. Like drunken fighting, for example.

I'm not a fan of CoD4 and I can certainly see how it can be considered bland and boring. What I have a harder time understanding is how HL2 can be seen as much better game when, at least from what I saw of CoD4, the core gameplay seems to be about the same: linearly move forward while killing the faceless baddies the game throws at you.

Playing The Witcher, DMC4 and System Shock. On the subject of HL2, I found it bland, unengaging, and way too linear. The engine was great, though. It ran very well, and looked quite stunning at the same time. I played a bit of CoD4 the other day, and as far as linear shooters go it seemed much, much better than HL2 even if the gameplay suffered from repetitiveness.

Bioware certainly doesn't have the will do it, considering the games they released after BG2.

And you'd be correct.

This love of sequels really annoys me. I mean, I can understand execs loving sequels, but seeing the customers repeatedly clamoring for more of the same gets on my nerves. Every time I hear someone talk about "franchises", while referring to games, I get urges to be violent.

I'm installing the patch right now with all language packs. I can't wait to give it a go in French. The way Geralt acts around women it will be like playing a Pepe Le Pew RPG.

Yes. Shepard - "Tell me about whatever" the other person - "wall of awkward text" I have to disagree on that "wall of text" part. For most of the time, Mass Effect didn't hit you with wall of text, you could skip out of talky situations fast with right side neutral option. Even if you chose to ask just about everything, there wasn't that much text. More detailed info went into codex and then it would be your option if you chose to read it, or some cases, listen excellent narrative voiceover. I think other developers should do the same and give players more options how much info they want about the world, story or the characters. The point isn't that you have an option not to read it, but rather that the information in those monologues should be conveyed to the player through flowing conversations, and through mise en sc

Milk is the best drink ever, right after milk laced with vodka.

Yes. Shepard - "Tell me about whatever" the other person - "wall of awkward text"

I'm not even talking about the methods or about integrating the writing with the game design. I'm talking about how the writing stands on its own. It's just ghastly. Exposition in Mass Effect, for example, is generally atrocious.

It's like everyone has a completely different standard of quality regarding writing in games. Imagine reading a book or seeing a movie done with Bioware's level of writing. It would be universally derided.

Finding Higgs isn't "just" finding Higgs. finding it means figuring out why it has been so hard to find, it means closing the final gap in the Standard Model, it will probably shed some light on why there are so many particles in Quantum Physics, and hopefully, it will be the first experimental step towards finding evidence for supersymmetry.

I'm seriously considering downloading all the language packs. At least the English, French, and Polish ones I'm downloading for sure.

This is going to take a while...

Wrong, actually. It will be awesome for physics if they're able to find Higgs boson. It will be a bit problematic if they don't find Higgs, but even that would be akin to not finding an ether drift in the late 19th century: it would just be a stepping stone towards further awesomeness.

There was this one girl in the 5th and 6th grades who liked me. Before that, I have no idea. I think I've always been fairly good at figuring out whether someone fancies me, except in the cases where I fancy them. My love life is a mess...

Nope, no gameplay footage, unfortunately. We're all still waiting for it. There have been some gameplay demos displayed at trade shows, but nothing has been released to the public yet.