Slowtrain

What do you mean with "Americanized"? Watered down. Like the beer, the coffee, the porn.

It's kinda funny. I sorta agree with all those points, but I still quite enjoyed the game. Maybe it was the boobie cards?

Bioware games are pretty narcissistic. ALthough most video games are to a degree. Bioware just seems to up the narcissism ante somewhat.

Interesting. I never noticed that. So there were 2 different VA's who did the US version of Geralt? I owned the UK version. Ah, ok. In the US version, I think there is just one Geralt VA.

I'm just hoping it doesn't end up Americanized for the sake of revenue.

So he's the Gene Shalit of game reviewers? lol. No, Croshaw is a lot funnier ps. IS Gene Shalit still alive? You and I are probably the only ones old enough to remember him around here regardless.

Actually I would say the mistake was buying a game shortly after release and expecting it to be bug-free. Granted, obs has a poor track record on buggy releases, but it's really an industry-wide problem.

I actually had it that I clicked on a male soldier and he said his main story one-liner, then I clicked on a female soldier and I got the same one-liner...in the exact same voice as the male soldier! That reminds me of Boiling Point, where a character conducted an entire conversation with a different voice actor for each line. The Witcher had shades of this at times. Geralt would just randomly change voices between lines, but there only seemed to be the two. Interesting. I never noticed that. So there were 2 different VA's who did the US version of Geralt?

Pretty witty, huh? More witty than I deserve, probably.

lol. That's known as Bethesda Dalogue Syndrome, aka BDS.

Stop it. You cannot. It's not human. but then agin you're not really human are you? You're Hell Kitty. lol.

WHen it comes to VOs for npcs do people prefer the Bethie version in which one voice actor does a huge number of voices, ranging from major npcs to generic townsfolk? Or do you think it would be better to just have dialogue floats for generic npcs (ie no VO for minor characters) and save the voice actors for just major quest-significant NPCS?

I'm waiting until one can preorder the preorder. @purk: I agree and that's why I want to hear reactions from here. Obsidianites tend to be more in line with my taste in gaming than others.

I thnk Croshaw should be considered a humorist first and a reviewer second. Which isn't an insult at all. I think its cool how he's managed to make games a foundation of his humor. But his reviews are really of secondary importance to being funny.

That was a tough fight early in that chapter. Incineration and poson reistance helps a lot. I always used the fast style against the echinops and variants even though it doesn't do as much damage as the strong style. The fast style hits so quickly and often that it prevents counterattacks.

I hope (and encourage!) some of you take a few minutes to do brief reviews and impressions of this game once it is released. I'm not touching it until I hear reactions from people here.

@grommie: I agree that expectations do not alter the quality of the game but they do change how people see the reasons to play the game. No one is expecting a game from Iron Tower to compete in either graphics or presentation with a Bioware game, but they may be expecting it to be better in writing, gameplay mechanics, chocie and consequence, or whatever. Not saying personally that it is any of those things, but people would be looking at the game to offer different strengths that the by now very-generic Bioware version of the rpg.

I c/p'ed this from the mod thread so as not to derail that thread. I find this post interesting because it seems to indicate that sp's are much more valuable in NV than in FO3? Maybe it's just mkreku's play style? I'm curious because I always played a 4 int char in FO3 and never took skill point ennhancing perks and my characters always felt grotesly overpowered by level 12-15 regardless. I was going to do this in NV as well, but if sp's are more valuable there, I might take a different approach. How do people feel about the availability of sp's in NV? DO you need a high int?

Yeah, because publishers and developers are very concerned with what internet forum dwellers go on and on about Not specifically what one poster says, no, but it all adds up. ANyway, it doesn't matter since we all know the graphics are very important to most gamers, despite the rampant, OMG-grafics-don't-matter BS many of them spout, then proceed to go on and on about how the graphics suck. This thread and the DX 3 thread are perfect examples of graphical importance, in opposite ways. Agreed, plus it's harder to sell a game on awesome ambient sound work than it is on awesome visuals.

Fact: Going on and on about graphics as being a measure of a game, either good or bad, simply makes publishers and developers even more convinced that graphics are far and away the most imporatnt part of the game. Really, unlese you just like games for the images, you're shooting yourselves in the foot.

SO what are you guys saying? If the graphics are bad then the game is (will be) bad? Forget even that "good graphics" is pretty subjective anyway.

*shrug* we've been down this road before. Different expectations and so forth about what developers can do with the resources they have. It may not be "fair", but success breeds expectations.

Yup, good points. Especially since I now consider Far Cry is a game where the graphics add to the gameplay, they become part of the gameplay, so to speak. Which was really the first time I ever felt that in a game. As far a sound goes, I do wish that sound, especially environment/ambient sound was given a lot more importance in game development. It's one of those things that it's hard to use to sell a game though, so it doesn't get as much priority as it probably deserves. One thing I do like about this form is that people here are less prone to the "looks good - is good" fallacy. Which is one reason I find the reactions in the DX3 thread surprising.

Its a hot topic, as it always is, because games are primarily still a visual medium. How they look is extremely imporant to a lot of people. I don't happen to be one of them, simply because I've been around long enough to not make the knee-jerk association between looking good and being good*. A huge percentage of gamers are unable to make this distinction. Same thing is going on with the DX3 thread as well. *edit: Or vice versa looking bad and being bad.

Did Tolkien really start that? I was under the impression, perhaps incorrectly, that very little of Tolkien's mythos was original.