Slowtrain

i'm working on the perfect existential video game, which encourages you to desist from all action on the basis that the material world is an illusion. it's so zen, you don't even have to load onto your computer. i'd make it available for free download, but that would involve action and thereby negate its non-purpose. That's too complex. The shareholders would never approve.

*scratches head* I don't see how you arrive anywhere close to that thought for either game. Both games are still a work in progress and little info has been released about either. They have just as a good a chance to be terrible as they do to be great. It's nice you are an optimist, but it doesn't mean much as to how things will actually turn out.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that what brought me to games years ago was the complexity and the details and the arcana and the rulesets. That was all the stuff that made games attractive to me. Now as games go more and more mainstream and actively seek to lose all those things that brought me to games in the first place, really its no wonder why I am less and less interested in gaming. If I were first coming to gaming today, I would probably find it a pretty boring way to spend time.

I'm waiting for a crpg where the player character never actually has to move from their starting sport for the duration. Instead the entire game just comes right to him and there's no dialogue at all but just some sort of "action substitute". Streamlined.

I hate how dialogue gets in the way of story. Cave painting ftw. I have grown to hate the word streamline in all its forms.

Wizardry 8 had an awesome tree village. My party members once fell off a catwalk and plummeted hundreds of feet to their deaths.

Thanks for the info. That's not as bad as I thought it was. How many times can a character respec?

Interesting. I never heard of respec before either. On the surface it sounds rather silly. Why not just make all your points totally dynamic and let you shuffle them around whenever you want? I could take my Oblivion fighter at level 20 and go from high stregnth/endurance to a mage with high int and wil. That seems rather a goofy concept. I understand the frustration gamers feel if they put togther a bad character, but that solution seems....

Operation Flashpoint, SWAT, R6, etc... All you really need is a good set of tools to control and order your squaddies around. Perspective is irrelevant - unless what you want is not squadmates, but multiple *player* characters. If I have to direct all the actions of the group I really can't do it in a first person view. It's just too difficult for me.

If I am playing a single character game I prefer a first person view regardless of gametype. When I have control of a squad or a small group though some sort of non-first person view is pretty essential. I actually found the third person view in Oblivion pretty playable for melee and general movement. Ranged attacking was pretty difficult though. Since I would imagine that the bread and butter of FO3 combat is going to be ranged, I think the devs pretty much have to give first person view the priority, unless they implement some serious auto-aim functionality.

I think Blizzard has released more quality info about their game in two days than Bethesda has about FO3 in two years.

The thing that concerns me the most is how incredibly little info Bethesda has released about the game. They have released almost nothing substantive and we know almost nothing about all major parts of the game. The game is now about 2 months from release and all we are still getting is the same trivial intro playthrough from Pete Hines. We don't even know if a construction kit is going to be made available. Perhaps Bethesda is just waiting to make a big PR splash with a bunch of info in a few weeks. Perhaps they are still fine tuning the game and don't feel ready to show it yet (which is pretty concerning about the quality of the game if they don't yet feel ready to show any part of it, given the release date is now right around the corner). But my concern is they know that what they have put together isn't that great or isn't going to make a lot of people happy and they are just holding back as long as they can from going public with it. If they had good stuff to show and talk about, don't you think they would be showing and talking about at least some of it by now? Hopefully, this is alll groundless fear, but I don't recall either MW or OB having this degree of hush hush around its last couple months of development.

That's totally correct. Your leveling up doesn't change per se, but you don't need to micromanage anymore since getting better actually does mean that you are getting better relative to your enemies, which if course was not the case in vanilla OB. If you can't beat someone know, come back in a few levels and try again; they'll still ne what they were and you will be better! Revolutionary gameplay for a crpg, wot? lol On a side note, OOO can be pretty difficult at low levels. I would recommend staying out of all dungeons until you are at least level 5 and have some resources.

IF they release a construction kit.

Looks pretty cool. After skipping Diablo 2 due to my overkill on Diablo 1, I find the idea of palying Diablo 3 somewhat exciting. wheee *bounces*

I was going to try Eve a while ago but wa ssomewhat put off by some things, mostly that the combat wasn't more realtime twitch style which I find more fun. So I never really bothered. What did you think of it?

What no jumpdrive? TS with no jumpdrive = target practice. I can't afford one yet. But I usually don't put jump drives in my transport ships. Although if I had to be stuck flying a slow wallowing beast later in the game. I would out one in there just to protect the pilot. Namely me! Getting blown up while flying a TS is quite embarrassing. Which is to say, it has happened to me a lot. lol.

My transport ship is under attack by pirates and I am unarmed (plus severely outnumbered). Since I am on good terms with the race that owns this system I am flying in close to one of their capital ships which is opening fire on the pirates around me.

I went lookign for a faq from Oblivion's development deays that discussed this exact issue, but I couldn't find it anymore. oh well,. Anyway, the larger point here is that it is difficult to balance a game where you can increase any/all of your skills infinitely and recieve all positive benefits of increasing those skills while not increasing your level. Is it impossible to balance this? No. But I've never really seen it work. Much easier to simply go with an XP/skillpoint allocation system such as SPECIAL or just a straight level based system like D&D.

I don't recall ever hearing such a complaint. A player who levels up stealth, light armor, and longsword isn't going to level up the same as heavy armor, athletics, and axes. There's enough skills that you're not going to be levelling them all up the same. WHy not? Plenty of people would put heavy armor as a minor skill and then use it to incrase their endurance stat. It is not as bad as in Oblivion, true, since the level scaling wasn't quite as obnoxious.

Thanks I think I am going to play this demo quite a bit more over the next couple of nights... I've never heard about these games before The X universe games are basically free-roaming games that offer you a lot of ways to entertain yourself in the game universe. There is a story attached to the game, but just like Oblivion, you can put it off indefinitely or drop out of it whenever you want, and just go do whatever you want. These games are not for everyone. ANyone who favors linearity or a well-told gripping narrative is going to be lost the moment they launch into the universe at the start of the game. The only real overarching goal is to acquire enough loot to do what you want through whatever means you can find. It's sort of a cross between an empire building sim and a space combat sim, with your "empire" consisting of fleets of ships and trading stations. For the most part you can play it as a trader with alomst no fighting (unless you follow the main story), but if you build in unprotected systems, you'll have to maintain either mobile or static defenses to protect your assets, plus you'll also have to protect your supply routes for your freighters. There's a lot of logisitics and strategy involved. You can also play it as a combat sim with little or no trading. It takes longer to amass great wealth that way, and you tend to lose some of the flavor of the universe by not participating in its economic system. With all the updates and patches applied the universe feels very alive as the AI goes about its business controlling the thousands of ships that travel about the sectors. Every once in a while you'll see the AI fly one of its ships right into the side of assteroid but that pretty rare. Amassing wealth, building fleets that contain hundreds of ship from small to large, erecting factory stations and keeping them running, buying all sorts of gadets and doohickeys for your vessels, is pretty much the name of the game. There's nothing like driving your own private carrier through the galaxy to let people know you've "arrived". More impressive than a Porsche any day. lol

ASk and ye shall recieve, mighty Gorth. SHift-e. It helps to have someone you can ask questions of when starting X2. A lot of stuff remains unexplained in the tutorials and the manual. A poster named Greyhawk over at Missy's Lair helped me out a lot when I first played the game. I'm always happy to do the same fpr pthers.

FIrst assignment!

Ship details menu!

Hi MC. I started a new game of X2. Here are some screenies for flavor. First ship!