Slowtrain

I remember THAC0 reset when you went over level 20.

Benny Hill was the high point of contemporary televised entertainment. Well, that and Space: 1999. Since then it's all been downhill, accelerating as we go.

Wait, what? Drakensang? A new standard for win? Please. BIS and Obs combined have never made a game that ****ty. That being said, I'm waiting for the inevitable announcement that FO:NV has been cancelled.

Going to be the best game of the year. DOn't miss out!

Finally got around to seeing Sherlock Holmes. I enjoyed it quite a bit, more so than most apparently.

The problem is that the bigger the DLC gets, the more they become like full games and the less value the publisher gets out of it. It's in a publishers best interest to keep DLC as small and piecemeal as possible and sell a lot of them. From a publisher's POV Horse Armor is a great DLC. They'd wet themselves in excitement if they could sell a whole game in little .99 pieces like that. Can you imagine how many .99 DLC pieces it would take to build Oblivon's gameworld? The game would cost more than a small real world country.

True, but Oblivion's exploded faces were a rare and special quality that few games posess.

Pretty much. I still enjoyed the game though. The animations remained painful to watch for the duration, however And I think, personally, that AP looks way better than Fallout 3. Based on what we've seen, of course. Maybe in person the game actually looks horrible or something. So far though, criticism of the graphics strikes me as pretty ridiculous. Does anybody still care about Crysis? Not really. Great graphics but a pretty mediocre game that came and went with little fanfare. Deus Ex, otoh, had pretty poor graphics, relative to the high-end games of the day, when it was released, and yet still remains a talked about classic to this day.

When the numbers are put there just like this, it's insane to see how little value DLC provides for the cost.

It's the way to go, I think.

The best thing I think is to wait for a GOTY-type edition, that bundles all the dlc with the original game plus patches. Then you get everything for often less than the cost of the original edition of the vanilla game. You get what you want and the publishers and developers don't get nearly as much as they could have. Part of the problem of course is that publishers know most gamers charge out like lemmings the day a game is released so the developers know that they can pretty much get away with almost anything for the first few weeks. A little patience on the part of the gamers everywhere would be highly empowering to the community.

Fallout 3 had pretty poor visuals and did more than OK in the next gen game market.

I do agree with that. I remember in Invisible War how I kept trying to activate trashcans in the opening lab levels because they looked like computer terminals. Of course, that may just have been the result of bad art rather than any engine limittations or problems.

I'd think it'd depend on why the graphics were bad as to whether its a justified criticism. I don't need fancy graphics in a game, but it can be possible for graphics to be a hinderence to enjoyment, I think. Absolutely. Modern graphics have changed the way games are written. You don't need a character to spell out their feelings if they can emote convincingly. If Alpha Protocol can't deliver on that premise, if the technical aspects are off, it's going to detract from the overall success of the story. I'll freely grant that I am much less demanding of graphics than most gamers, but even still, the grapphics in AP look more than capable of delivering on the game's promised gameplay. In the end, that is all that counts: Are the graphics good enough to make the gameplay work. Anything beyond that is just gravy and not neccessary for full enjoyment of the game.

That's the nature of dlc and its why devs and publishers love it so. It's cheap and easy to make and they can charge a huge amount of money per content vs a regular game. As I said in a previous thread, if FO3 was priced for content at the same ratio as its DLC, the vanilla game would cost somewhere between 500-1000 USD. The amount that is charged for DLC is outrageous, but because its in such small increments, people don't realize how much they are getting ****ed. It

Funny things is, reagardless of how it sells, it will probably be a much more complex and interesting game than ME 1 and 2 combined. The fact that the main crit of AP is the "bad graphics" is pretty pathetic and just shows where game "journalists" are at these days.

Hmmm. I thought those were wings.

It's almost pointless to bother asking. Bigotry never runs out of ways to justify itself.

I disagree. This is a pretty balanced and rational board. So much so, it's almost boring. Anyway, it's the internet. Beating dead horses and what not is part of the game.

A waste of time for you perhaps. Which is fine. But maybe not so for others Perhaps. Often though it is the search for possible answers, rather than the answers themselves, that has value. I think that applies to both science and faith. Science alone can give us knowledge. No question. Which has a lot of value. But can science alone give us meaning? I'm not saying science is a bad thing, which I hope is obvious, I'm merely positing that science and some sort of faith can, and maybe even should, go hand in hand. Faith balances science and science balances faith. Either one operating alone is a somewhat frightening prospect.

The theory of evolution and the Big Bang, like all science, say nothing about the existence or inexistence of God. But for those who wish to attribute some aspect of creation to a divine force there shouldn't be a problem. Science is a fine tool, but it is neither an end or an answer in and of itself. There's no reason science and some sort of faith in the divine cannot coexist. IMO, positing an extreme anti-divine science as salvation is just as problematic as positing an extreme anti-science divine faith as salvation.

Its a result of the Witcher's mutation process. In addition to physical trainign they are subjected to a course of drugs and herbs that cause physiological changes. Many potential Witcher's die during the regimen. Those who survive often ended up with obvious physical mutations. At least that's what I gleaned from the first game. I never read Sapkowski's books.

That looks a lot more like Geralt from Witcher 1 than the current Geralt. The current Geralt looks like a GI joe face. Or something.

I agree with this, and I think it is a problem in a lot of games. Oblivion seemed to suffer from this horribly, making already badly written dialogue even worse.

i was just about to say that. as i recall, the witcher 1 had OK voice acting. Uhhh really? I thought it was pretty poor quality, even for an indie game, when I played the first 10 minutes of it. Will play the game fully when I get a better comp, but I can't see voice acting being one of its positive points. The voice acting was pretty good for the most part, compared to other games. AT least in the US English version.