Slowtrain

90% of the internet is repetiton. That's just the way it was built.

Just the buggy ones. So Obsidian is guaranteed to be there Actually it's pretty crowded. Battlecruiser 3000 AD has an entire circle all to itself.

Just the buggy ones.

That makes a little more sense, though may be spin, of course. One would think that Crytek's experience with Crysis would have developers shying away from any system breaking hardware requirements.

IIRC, I think I stopped playing after the statue battle. That was enough for me.

we've lost a chunk of our previous elitism. I haven't.

You can take out those drums by having an archer sidle up just to where the for of war edges past the drum and shoot the drums full of arrows. Most times you won't get attacked. Cheese yes, but IWD2 is a game that deserves as much cheese as you can throw at it.

My core 2 duo e6850 cries. But I can't complain; it's lasted longer than any other processor I've ever had.

Even after all these years, the old IE still looks pretty good.

How come Tigranes doesn't getting any magical effect icons. He looks absurdly naked.

It's going to be fun watchiing Tig play through this, but the thought of having to actually play through the game myself leaves me feeling vaguely ill. Although, I don't know if I can even look at an inventory screenie filled with returning frost darts without suffering adverse reactions. Some wounds never heal.

A frightening vision of the apocalypse, that particular party.

I can't believe people say that. It's Dungeon Siege we're talking about here, for crying out loud! Even if they tried to dumb it down further, they would just bounce against the bottom of the dumbing-down barrel where the previous two Dungeon Siege games resided! IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO DUMB IT DOWN ANY FURTHER. Geez. I tend to agree. It's not possible to make the game any more "streamlined" than it already was in its previous iterations. Unless you simply have the game play itself while you sit there eating popcorn from beginning to end. Even that, DS1 almost did.

If the whole game had been as solid as Targos, it would have been a fab game. Much like Lionheart, a good opening area that degenerates into pretty tedious combat later.

I hope this means more than being called out because you went into the women's restroom of HQ looking for lockpicks and multitools.

Nice. That was one of those ideas that probably sounded better in Bethie's FO3 developer meetings than it actually turned out to be when implemented. Repeating the same vo lines excessively is almost always problematic. Better to say nothign at all instead.

I only got through IWD2 by resting a lot. The Ice Temple was a true test of will to keep playing through. Haven't played any D&D crpgs since.

Ehrm, maybe I misinterpreted but didn't Tig finish the game and then retried the final battle at Insane just for fun? I may have gotten lost somewhere along the way. lol

Awesome Iron Man run. Making it that far is just as good as finishing, really. The kill numbers are pretty nuts, I had forgotten how much pure slaughter was in that game.

Tig, I stand in considerable of awe of your ability. Not just in playing the game through in IM, but also managing to push all the way through with this LP thread. They are a ton of work. Given your apparent enjoyment with tactical combat, you should try Jagged Alliance 2. Iron Man. Tis most fun.

I disagree. I think it is a really terrible mechanic because it relies almost entirely on random chance and virtually nothing that the player is doing. Fighting Navarro is probably the best example of this, as you and the Enclave trade nickel-and-dime body blows round after round until a crit wipes out (hopefully) an enemy or WHOOPS! You reload the game! WHat's wrong with critical hits being based on chance? Over time, wearing better armor will always reduce the amount of damage you take, which is the point, but a critical hit can still cause problems, so don't get too comfortable, since you never know when its coming. Critical hits don't have to be insta-kills. FO1/2 had too many of those. A critical hit just has to do enough damage to up the threat level to the player.

I completely agree that this is a problem that needs to be avoided. However, I don't see how being henpecked by a bunch of low damage attacks is any more interesting that not being damaged at all. It's not as if the threat level has been changed. In both cases the threat is 0, unless you happen to have no stimpacks at all. ANd since FO3's combat is basically one of stimpack attrition, it wold seem unlikely any player would not have stimpacks. Critical his that bypass armor and do large amounts of damage and deal assorted limb destroying effects keeps combat interesting because the player can never take anything for granted. SOme of the critical hit damage numbers in FO1/2 were execessive, but the overall mechanic was very effective.

I'm honestly not sure what is the design reason for this. Because it makes the game boring against certain enemy types once you get heavy enough armor. With MinDam set to 0.0, eventually you can literally just walk around a horde of guys pounding you with low-end weapons and never take any damage. It doesn't really produce good long-term game play. Similarly, I don't think it produced good results in F1 and F2, where near the end game people would go round after round taking 0 damage until an armor-bypassing triple damage critical forced a reload. AS long as critical hits bypass armor for big damage and crippling, no amount of armor is ever safe. A better approach than having a forced and arbitrary min damage. Is min damage a constant percentage or does it vary depending n factors such as weapon, ammo type, and skill? That would make it slightly more interesting. However, on the plus side, your comments imply that armor DT does not reduce through damage sustained, unlike armor DR in FO3, which reduced as the armor suffered damage. If that's true, I'm happy. That was an annoying armor mechanic in FO3.

DOn't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to weapon degredation in a crpg if it has some important in-game consequence and ramification. But I've never seen one that did. Even a great crpg like System Shock 2 had a cruddy and pointless degredation mechanic. Most often it seems that repairing weapons and armor is simply put in to justify a repair skill. Because of course it much easier to do that rather than put the repair to actual in game use solving quests and stuff. Which is what a repair skill should be used for. I'm still hoping NV at least returns to Morrowind/Oblivion style repair tools that will at least eliminate the need to tote around 10 sets of power armor and 12 minguns.