Slowtrain

crappy rehashing of stagnant concepts.

next gen games don't have details. Details are too complicated.

Wait, so Hurlie is a bot? Not surprising. He's way too calm and rational.

Really, you can't compare the combat directly. Fallout is a rpg with a TB combat system. Jag 2 is a TB combat game with some rpg mechanics. Both games did a great job on what the chose to focus on.

I dunno. I think he always does a good job at deconstructing a lot of the stupid conventions of rpgs in a humorous way.

The honesty would be refreshing. But specifically in that case, movies aren't something I pay much, if any, attention to really so I don't really care one way or the other. I only have so much elitism to spend.

I've missed you. This place just isn't the same without you kicking me around.

I dunno. It seems so obvious. And the developers admit it for the most part. IIRC, Josh himself even made some reference to hardcore gamers being generally more tolerant of simplification and lack of difficulty than casual/mass gamers are of complexity and difficulty, so it makes more financial sense to court the gamer who likes things simple and easy than it does to court the gamer who likes things complex and difficult. I'm paraphrasing his comment obviosuly, but iirc that was the jist of it. It just bugs me that in the name of pr spin, developers and publishers refer to it as streamlining rather than dumbing down. Just be honest and call it what it is.

He's always said he doesn't like rpgs. He's still amusing though.

Enjoyment has nothing to do with it. IF somebody isn't interested in playing Deus Ex, that's aok. If someone gives DX an honest shot and finds it dull and boring that's fine. I have no interest in dictating to people what they should or should not enjoy. My issue is strictly with the idea that games aren't dumbed down to appeal to a larger audience, now vs 10 years ago. Of course they are. It's the economics of the current business model for the industry.

*shrug* I'm just going by what I recall the developers saying when responding to why Oblivion was so dumbed down from MW. On a larger scale, I think the desire to sell as many games as possible is so overwhelming that the current design paradigm for many titles is to make them capable of being played without requiring a single iota of thought or learning. It's the absolute epitome of Lowest Common Denominator programming. ANd nothing very interesting usually comes out of that.

Utter nonse. Deus Ex isn't particularly more complex than many games released nowadays. Well, apparently it is, acording to the DX3 developers. I think its somewhat more complex than Bioshock. Just as SS2 was more complex than Bioshock. Developers at Bethesda explained that they had to simplify Oblivion drastically over MW, includign the little compass, because apparently a good number of gamers quit playing because they couldn';t figure out how to get from Seyda Neen to Balmora for the first step of the main quest. Sights have been lowered dramatically.

Exactly, its learned knowledge. Just like anything else worth doing.

ANybody who didn't understand the gameplay mechanics of Deus Ex or found them overwhelming is an idiot. It wasn't rocket science. Sure, if you had never played a game before, maybe you'd have to read a manual and spend some time getting used to everything. But games are now being designed with the goal of the stupidest person on the planet finding it copmpletely accessible without even reading the directions. WHen you lower your sights to that level, you're going to turn out mediocre drivel. At best. ANd probably not even that.

Sure. Complexity does not have to be confusing. Maybe it takes a bit more work on the part of the developers, but isn't that their job?

*shrug* If wanting games that engage me and keep me interested is elitist, then so be it. I'm an ultra uber elitist gamer. Like I said, I accept the way it is, but I find the ongoing developer/publisher denial of "we're not dumbing down, we're streallining" uterlly laughable.. Every time I see it, I think of the scene in Full Metal Jacket where Joker's CO at Stars and Stripes instructing all his reporters to subsitute the phrase "sweep and clear" for "search and destroy". lol. Like that changes anything.

Yeah, see I couldn't play like this. It would be too boring CRPGs need the carrot of character development to keepme going. Generally speaking, although there may be the occasional exception. I much prefer that a crpg be balanced so that the level cap/max development levels are essentially unreachable except through extreme effort. Like in Fallout 1. I finished my first playthrough at around level 15 (Level cap 21) and it was only in a later playthrough that through massive farming of xp I was able to reach the cap ( just to check out the sniper perk!).

I remember when I played FO3 without a slow-down mod. My pc was level 14 and I had only explored a tiny portion of the map and hadn't done any quests except the megaton ones. I realized at that point that I was going to hit the level cap long long long before I had explored even a moderate portion of the world and followed the quest lines further. So I dl'ed a mod which increased the XP required to gain levels by a huge amount and started over. Much better experience. I have no problem with level caps, but once I hit them I usually stop playing. I don't find crpgs interesting enough to play without the gameplay mechanic of character development engaging me. The leveling speed of Fallout 3 (and Oblivion) was so out of whack with the size of the game, it was totoally ridiculous. There's no need to have super fast leveling in a giant game with so much to do. I can only assume that it has to do with the average adolesecent having the attention span of a gnat and getting bored if they don't level every 10 minutes.

A little more than 100 employees, but they're usually split on a lot of projects at the same time. Really, I don't think there are complicated explanations, it's just that Obsidian is not good at scope managing. It maybe just mnore than scope and be a problem with management in general. WHile it's likely that SOME of the development problems of both AP and the ALien crpg were partly Sega's issue, I can't see how a large portiob of the problems weren't Obsidians. They seem to have a problem with project direction and management. Which probabl leads to not enough time and personnel to work out the final bug issues.

Yup, but to be fair, as far as I understand, they're just an option when fighting, instead of the typical QTE "if you don't click you die". The first "leaked" video wasn't a section in the game anyway. Cool. Thanks. That's good to know.

OK. I thought you were comparing games developed by Bio with games developed by BI.

lol @ "different from dumbing down" Your making games that are less complex than they once were simply so they can be understood by people who drool on themslves when they talk. So, dumbing down. I accept that's the way it is, but don't deny it. Just say, yeah, we're making games for idiots with short attention spans who 5 years ago were too cool to play games.

Lionheart was developed by Reflexive.

That article says "Lovecraftian Themes" not Lovecraftian. Not the same thing. For example: Hellboy had lovecraftian themes, but I wouldn't call it Lovecraftian.

How are people finding the leveling speed? I though FO3's leveling rate was absurd and the game was unplayable without a mod to slow it down. Are people finding NV to be a bit more balanced in this regard?