Slowtrain

I've never felt the VO was bad in Beth games, it was just that they didn't have enough VAs. That's changing in Skyrim big time.

This thread is trying to make me reinstall Jag 2. crud. I hate it when that happens

lol. yeah, I was kinda thinking the same thing. It's a little freaky. @lexx: if my original post came off as harsh, I apologize. It wasn't meant that way.

This could very well be the case, and may be a huge problem with the game. It also may be that the devs choose to spend their time elsewhere than the character portraits. *shrug* Since no one knows yet, seems pointless to criticize. The overall presentation to me has seemed pretty good as far as keeping the feel of Jagged Alliance 2. Truth is, yeah, the game will probably suck overall, but I figure I might as well keep an open mind.

And Lexx never implied that his eventual purchase rested on that feature, either, so why the hell are you even saying that in the first place? Surely you are familiar with the concept of trolling? *shrug* trolling wasn't my intention. it just bugged me to see a non AAA game criticized for appearance and presentation issues, especially for ones that have 0 affect on the gameplay. When you're dealing with non-AAA relases, they're never going to look as good as one might desire. I don't see any point in being critical of such things.

And Lexx never implied that his eventual purchase rested on that feature, either, so why the hell are you even saying that in the first place? I was just wondering why he would bring it up in the first place? What do character portraits have to do with a game being worth buying or even just good? Unless it's some kind of make-up simulator or something.

Sure, there's a difference. But who cares? Are there militia, mine income, a dynamic campaign? I'm not buying the game because the character portraits are hot. edit: I just looked at them a little more closely and they're not even that bad. They'll do the job well enough.

This isn't a Bioware game. The character portraits don't need to look like fashion models out on a photoshoot.

I think that trailer is actually pretty good as far as having the feel of the original. But not completely sold on the game. SOme parts of it look decent, but iirc its a standard linear mission-based game which I usually find pretty dull. The best part of Jagged Alliance 2 was its blend of tactical combat, strategic command, and dynamic non-linear campaign. With two of those three things missing not a lot to recommend it. WHich affects the game how precisely? WHy would anyone care?

Learn-by-doing systems are one of those things that is great in concept, but usually sucks when actually implemented. They are just way too hard to balance. The whole "level up, get skill points, put them where you want to" system may be boring, but it's simple and it works. However, in Skyrim it seems Bethesda is finally detaching the learn by doing aspect of skill improvement from stat increases at level up, since stats appear to now be static. WHich is a huge plus. Should make the lbd system much more tolerable.

Graphically it was the biggest criticism of both MW and Oblivion. Potentially it was the only criticism one could make since environments in both games were very good. The environmental graphics in Skyrim don't appear all that more impressive than Oblivion, but that is still plenty good enough. The character graphics are a huge improvement, even from FO3, which was a huge improvement from Oblivion.

They look more than good enough for what Bethie wants to do, definitely. Actually, they look much better than they need to be.

I don't even get where people are coming from when they say screenies like that are ugly. What the hell kind of standard are they using. The screenies look great.

The violence in current video games is pretty ridiculous. Fallout 3's slow mo cartwheeling limbs, NV's slow motion kill-cam (or whatever they called that stupid thing), bioware's penchant for throwing blood splatter on every thing in sight. It's pretty weird. ANd completely unneccessary to making a great game.

I've got nothing against military shooters, per se, but it's a pretty depressing genre contraction if sf, horror, fantasy or whatever-themed shooters are all stopped in favor of these para-military goon fests. I'll give Bioshock and ME and DX credit for at least not being that.

Is that true? If so, depressing. Say goodbye to interesting shooters.

I'm certainly not condeming anyone for liking one over the other. I think which ever game one comes to first would set your expectations for the other, and since they are quite different, that expectation may get in the way of enjoying the second game you chose to play. FO2 had a lot of good stuff. Some of the locations were good, the better companion interaction and control was good, I thought the larger size of the world map was overall a positive. But FO2 had SO much stuff that by default some of it was bound to be good, almost by chance.

Likely. I played FO1 first and I think it is far superior. I never even finsihed FO2 since I found it pretty dull and unfocused. But someone who played FO2 first would most likely be disappointed by the lack of size and lower levels and less generalized goofiness of FO1. They are very different games, despite appearing similar at first glance.

People who played FO2 first do seem to find it the better game. Not across the board of course, but it seems fairly common.

all right! That's what I like.

Is that some kind of wrapper that allows the game to run on modern systems? Or is that a new (modded) version of the actual game? Wrapper basically along with some utilities for sound and the like, similar to the MoO/ XCOM DOSBox versions (all of which work fine on Windows 7/64 for me). There are also resolution increasing and key binding mods- not sure if they're integrated with it now or just compatible with it- to further enhance the experience, the version I have is around three years old. Its legality is a bit unclear, LGS allowed downloads of the SS1 iso prior to their closure (I got it from TTLG back in 2000, before it melted their bandwidth) so it's probably OK until whoever the rights holder is sends a cease and desist, which would probably be a precursor to it being put on GOG anyway. I still have my original cd of System SHock. I just can't get it to run anymore. I could try it in DOSbox but eh I had a lot of trouble with dosbox and Daggerfall some years ago and it soured me on the whole dosbox experience.

It's great. A highly under-appreciated game that combines a host of different gameplay types. When you installed the xcom games from steam did you have to do any configuring to get them going ot was it just install and play?

I agree, and yep, really it's hard to believe a company would be so dumb. So maybe not. But still... Nonetheless, I'm still thinking a SW mmorpg could be the WoW killer. Star Wars is practically a religion to some people.

crud. Steam has xcom. if I get it I'll never get any work done.

Is that some kind of wrapper that allows the game to run on modern systems? Or is that a new (modded) version of the actual game? You can get Xcom off steam, so it's likely legality that's stopping that. Hah. I never even realized! Does it run OK on modern OSs.