Slowtrain

It sure will be nice to find out something about the game. Its pretty amazing to think NV was announced so many months ago, and yet we still know basically nothing about the game. I'm espcially curious to hear about what is going to be changed/modified and what the fouces of the gameplay will be: combat? story? exploration?

That played some part. I regret my decision to share it because I didn't fully realize the ramifications. I knew that I would become in part a representative of the company, but I didn't realize how "official" people would take it. So when I shared my impressions about Dragon Age, some people felt it was fair game to insinuate that I had misled them when they didn't share the same impressions of the game. Being called a shill simply because I work for EA, even though I doubt I'd talk any differently about DA if I didn't work for BioWare, doesn't exactly make one feel superbly awesome. It's mostly my mistake. Since I now work for the company, people are going to treat me differently simply because I work for them. So outside of a few friends, I try to limit work discussions because it just makes things easier. Prevents me from needing to deal with inquiries and requests. Having to be silent about some stuff does make it a little more difficult. I knew about the expansion pack before it was announced and would have liked to share it, but couldn't. So I opted to limit my discussions about work and the games we make. That makes a lot of sense. I think it's a good approach. I was never quite clear on why you were so open about DA to begin with. If you are going to be here for fun, you shouldn't bring work with you. That's my philosophy anyway. Anyway, its nice to have you back. edit: spelling

The best thing about Bioshock 2 is that Ken Levine isn't involved in it, which means maybe he's actually working on something good this time. We know he can do good stuff so hopefully with Bioshock he purged the crap from his system and maybe we can get something more worth the Thief/System Shock/Looking Glass legacy.

I think I saw that in an old episode of Space Ghost.

What can change the nature of a man?

That is one thing we do agree on. When I told that to my Shakespeare professor it really irked him. Simply modernize the English a bit and you have American television. If you reduce anything enough, it all becomes the same.

Boo! More anger. plz.

To me, the best thing about games is interactive storytelling. There should be no conflict there at all. The problem is many developers treat story and gameplay as separate things, but to be a powerful medium games have to merge the two. Of course there's a conflict. The more choices the player is allowed, the more difficult is becomes to present a well-structured narrative. If the choices are trivial ones, then it is less of an issue, certainly, since the narrative doesn't have to alter grearlt to present a trivial choice. But major choices require major alterations of the narrative. Good luck with that in this day and age of inflated game budgets. Down the road, if AI becomes better at responding to player chocie and altering narrative flow dynamically, then it would be much more possible. Interactive doesn't just mean you occassionally get to make a "big" choice, although that's what Bioware is now defaulting to. In fact the best interactive story telling I've seen are games like Call of Cthulhu, Shenmue 2, and Thief: DS, where you hardly make any choices at all. Of course it's also possible to tell a story in a choice driven game, which is what Age of Decadence is trying to do, so we'll see how well that works. As far as mainstream developers, let's just say their priorities lie elsewhere $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ I guess we just differ in how we define interaction. Yes, interaction can be defined as simply pounding colored pegs through holes in order to move to the next level. But that sor tof interaction has nothing to do with changing the gameworld or having an effect on the narrative. It's just a puzzle. Puzzles are fine. But they;ve been in games for years. For me, interaction with a narrative is makign choices that reflect how the narrative plays out. Like in Deus EX, I would have like dto make the choice to stay with MJ12 and become buiddies with Gunther and Anna. But, of course, that wasn't an option. I had to leavbe MJ12/UNATCO and I had to kill Anna and Gunther. I understand why. Game developers can't afford to write multi-threaded narratives at this point. So its fine. But at the moment, interaction in games is pretty much limited to choosing your hair color, who you are goign to romance and which weapons to carry. Its just way too complex to try to make interactive narratives.

Just my personal take: I prefer loud, strident people who are passionate and care, even if I disagree, than people who just hum happily to themselves all day along

Its a total rip-off of SS2. I mean, its the same developer so he can do what he wants with his own games. But he just took SS2 and made it mediocre. And hey, he made a lot of money off it. Some credit where credit is due: he figured how banal, pretty games get more love than smart, ugly ones.

I played that way for the first couple levels, and enjoyed the game, but then I got bored with pretending that "dying" meant anything and just took the direct approach. Then I got really bored and then eventually really really bored and then somewhere on level 5 decided that I would rather be picking lint out of my navel than playing this game, so I did and never finished it.

No, its not. I don't even get how you can say that. Did we play the same game? All you have to do is run up to it and beat Big Daddies with a wrench. When they kill you, just run back and do it some more. There's nothing to be gained by being creative vs being thuggish and unimaginative. And the thuggish approach is faster and less resource intensive to boot. Defend Bioshock for its attempt at narrative if you want; don't defend it for its cruddy combat gameplay. edit: And I'll just point out that 2 small changes would have made Bioshock's combat a lot more interesting: 1) Make respawning in the vitachamber cost resources 2) Make all wounded enemies in the gameworld reset to full-health when the plcayer character respawns. Suddenly it's a much different game, combat-wise.

To me, the best thing about games is interactive storytelling. There should be no conflict there at all. The problem is many developers treat story and gameplay as separate things, but to be a powerful medium games have to merge the two. Of course there's a conflict. The more choices the player is allowed, the more difficult is becomes to present a well-structured narrative. If the choices are trivial ones, then it is less of an issue, certainly, since the narrative doesn't have to alter grearlt to present a trivial choice. But major choices require major alterations of the narrative. Good luck with that in this day and age of inflated game budgets. Down the road, if AI becomes better at responding to player chocie and altering narrative flow dynamically, then it would be much more possible.

I think gaming is still a relatively young medium and hasn't really developed much other than technically. Stories in games tend to be rather simplistic, broad swipes of bright color, without much subtlety, mostly becuase its just easier to deal with. Games I think will always be sort on an uneasy balance between gameplay and story, unlike a novel or a movie which can be mostly story since there really is no interaction, only presentation. The need for games to be interactive forces simplification of the narrative presentation almost by neccessity. IMO.

Great game. Used to have load of fun doing the dynamic campaigns in mutiplayer coop. Took a bit of pratice to get good at flying those things. The more or less total death of flight sims is pretty sad considering how awesome they could be on today's high powered systems. Flight sims used to be the cuttign edge of technology and graphics; now they don't even exist.

epic crapola, maybe.

I'll just add though the FO3's entire CC part almost did stop me playing the game. But I was interested enough to push by it.

I don't even understand how that's even possible. Unless it includes rentals, I suppose. Maybe if you're just renting on a whim. But even still, 5 minutes. If I am going to go to the effort of buying or renting a game, I'm going to give it at least a few hours. I mean, if I wasn't at least potentially interested in the game, I wouldn't have purchased/rented it in the first place.

Yeah, but was it better than Waterworld? It was better than Waterworld but not as good as the Postman. But it also wasn't like 4 hours long, so there ya go. That's somewhat positive. FOr whatever reason, it made me think of both The Postman and Waterworld when I saw the adverts. WHich is definitely not a good thing. Although, I only saw about the first 30 minutes of The Postman, so maybe it got better later.

Yeah, but was it better than Waterworld?

Awesome empire building/space sim. I'm playing it right now. FOr the 10th time.

I pretty much agree. But once I start facing Enclave patrols, my vanity loses out to common sense.

It's basically Boiling Point in space. Google-translated review here (8/10): http://tinyurl.com/y8sawkp Russian isn't easily translated as they use a lot of multi-word expressions in their language, but you'll get the gist of it. Cool. Thank you.

I'll just add that unless you are playing a melee/unarmed character there's little point to having a strength greater than 5. Unlike FO3, those stat points are vaulable and are better spent eleswhere. A guns character just doesn't need the extra strength. Your better off taking the sharpshooter perk and getting the bonus to perception which will help your to hit chance. If you are really bent on spending a perk , you can take the gain strength perk at level 12 ( I think) which will give you +1 str, but again, unlike FO3, those perks are really valuable and I don't know if gaining a point of str is really worth a perk. As I said before, if you really want to wield big guns, the power armor gives you a big strength bonus. Unless you don't like the PA (which I don't), there's no reason to have more than 4 strength at start. I usually take 5 since I never wear anything heavier than the combat armor.