Slowtrain

The Drassen counterattack was in the original game, but disabled in the released version. The 1.13 mod re-enabled it. On the higher difficulty levels with reinforcementrs set to On, its possible to be counterattacked by more than 100 elites. And yes, its a tough fight. The 1.13 mod makes the game more difficult than the vanilla version and is largely intended for people who have played the original to death. Their are line of sight restrictions and the AI is better at flanking. If you play on the Expert settign or above the eneny has addtional abilities, such as using spotters to scout for the snipers enabling their snipers to shoot from beyond visual range (which you can do as well, btw). SO you might want to try the unmodded Jag 2 first. Its a great great game without the mods. ANd probably more balanced.

Play LOTRO and see. Seems to me that many game players like to kill things. Limiting things that players like to do is poor design, no matter what sort of social engineering you are trying to do. I don't think that any quest should be forced on players. If someone wants to set aside questing to just explore and kill mobs, then they should be able to do that without stalling their character advancement. 2 responses come to mind here. 1) Hopefully, Fallout:NV will be aimed more at people who want to interact with a gameworld in ways other than killing everything. However, given that it is ultimately a Bethesda IP, I'm not anticipating that such will be the case. SO I wouldn't worry if I were you. The bulk of the game wil most likely be running around and killing stuff. But I'll still lobby for something more in the meantime. 2) Given the successful gameplay of other action/rpg games like System Shock 2, Deus Ex, and Bloodlines, which all had opportunity for all the killing and destruction a player could possibly hope for, yet did not directly award XP for the actual killing, your statement seems flawed. Character adavncement in no way has to be tied to killing while still presenting plenty of opportunity for killing if that is what the player wishes.

Fallout 3 crashes on my system randomly all the time. It always has. I don't think it's unusual for the game to do so.

everyone says the same thing when the first play Jag 2. On expert level difficulty the AI has a +10% to hit, but that's it. On easy it's -10%. Once you get some rifles, it'll get easier. And when you get some scopes it will get easier still.

Levine isn't even involved anymore, right? The IP has just been handed off to someone else?

what does Bioshock have to do with multiplayer? It doesn't even make sense; its the epitome of the story-driven single player game. But hey, if you find the spawn point you can put on the Big Daddy suit and BECOME the Big Daddy! Woohoo!

That's because there was nothing else to do in Fallout 3 BUT wander randomly. Wandering randomly WAS the game. If you took it out, there would be nothing left. Hopefully, in NV there will be lots of stuff ADDED to the game so that random wandering becomes much less the focus. There will of course still be some, probably a lot of random wandering, regardless. re: a small cult. If a developer is going to take the time and trouble to put something like the Children of the Atom into the game it should have a point of interactuion with the PC. Otherwise why waste the resources putting it in the first place. I fully expected some sort of tie in between my attempt to disarm the bomb and the Children of the Atom, that they would play some sort of role in the quest. I was disappointed they didn't, and that the entire quest resolution was just a matter fo walkign up to teh bomb and clicking on it. Boring.

It's been brought up before. I tend to agree that not allowing a choice of sex for the pc is a bit off-putting, but if the developers want to pick a specific sex (or race or whatever) for the protagonist that they are constructing the game around, that seems to me perfectly within their right. Just like it is within your right to not buy the game as well. If the developers feel that they want the main player character to be X, such as in Deus Ex or NOLF, and they allow X to develop as an interesting character, ultimately I think the sex (or race or whatever) of said character becomes somewhat irrelevant.

WHat about eliminating combat XP? ANd make all XP from resolving quests only? It would certainly make the game easier to balance since the devs would know exactly how much XP was in the game and could set the level cap accordingly. Or vice versa. Plus it would turn the game away from being such a combat heavy crpg and more into a crpg where you progress by interacting with the world rather than killing everything that looks at you funny.

Bethesda seems to have a problem with journals and automaps. Remember the automap from Daggerfall? It was probably the single most useless automap ever put in a game. Once you went more than a half dozen steps from the entrance the automap became totally useless. I'd love it if the FO3 world map could be zoomed out more and show the whole world at once. ANd the local map needs more range. But such was the case in NW and Oblivion as well. They both had terrible automaps.

I tend to agree with Purk. Yes, the game was stylistically, visually interesting, but for me that was about it. However, despite it's visual style, it completely failed to convince me that I was in an underwater city. Which I felt was a major problem with the environmental design. I could have been running around an apartment complex in downtown NYC. Good enviironmental dsign makes you feel the speace you are in. WHich SS2 did very well with the Von Braun and the RIckenbacker. Despite it's limited graphic capabilities inherent in the Dark Engine.

The merc AI gameplay in Far Cry 1 was quite good.

I agree. But speakinf of Crytek, Far Cry 1 was more of a classic than Crysis will ever hope to be. Far Cry 1 had a pretty big impact with its environment graphics as well as its big horizon and jungle creeping gameplay. It also had Trigens, of course. Which deals it a serious blow.

I suppose. Although it is such a "streamlined" version of SS2, that is plays more like a reduction of the previous game rather than an actually similar game. It's like EZ Reader version of SS2.

Not me. I almost fell out of my chair in shock.

Obviously no one from the team took the game journalists out for dinner and a show. They're feeling cranky and unloved.

Yeah, that zombie-goofy art has been around for quite a while. Was it posted here once before? It's odd that I remember seeing it before since I don't spend much (any) time randomly looking at stuff on the internet.

It always feels like Bethesda was sort of trying to do a Killian/Gizmo thing with Simms/Moriarty, but they stopped bothering somewhere along the line. Its odd how SImms warns you about Moriarty when you first enter Megaton, but Moriarty never actually does anything bad. He's actually very nice and encouraging. For all of his ten lines of dialogue. Fallout 3 seems more to me a game of missed opportunities for interesting characters/stories/quests then a game of actually interesting characters/stories/quests.

Well, at the moment, they're adding several games a week but, yeah, I do wish they could get Baldur's Gate I/II, IceWind Dale, Torment, etc.. The top 4 most requested games are System Shock 2, Torment, System Shock and Baldur's Gate 2. If these games are so in demand, I wonder why we aren't seeing new games similar to them.

Warren Spector appears to have pretty much followed DW BRadley into oblivion. Except without making Dungeon LOrds. Yet.

hmm. I must have blinked and missed those. But it would be sweet if NV had a little (or a lot) more "in town" action. You know, wandering around a settlement talking to people, getting involved in their lives, and a lot less just random roaming around the wastes blowing stuff up. Fallout 3 started off promisingly with Megaton, but it didn't take long to find out that almost everything there was purely cosmetic (the CHildren of the ATom, Moriarty, Simms, Gob, the water supply), and to make matters worse, it didn't take long to find out that there was only one other substantial settlement, Rivet City, in the entire game. Canterbury COmmons with its 4 people, doesn't count. I don't understand why Bethesda insists on putting stuff in the game (Like The CHildren of the Atom) and then doesn't even mak euse of them.

I live in downtown Boston and PC games are not easy to find in stores. The only place that is somewhat reliable is Best Buy and their selection of pc games is stil piss poor, especially compared to their miles and miles of console games.

The one down the street from me has a very small rack that's buried in the corner. The wall of shame. Whenever I look through it people point and laugh. Strange, where I am the two major game retailers (EB, Game) have fairly large selection of PC games. And I'm pretty sure EB is Gamestop. This one has been downsizing its pc side for a long time. 6 or 7 years ago, fully half the store was either pc games or pc related products. Now, like I said, there's alomost nothing left that is PC. I don't know if individual stores decide what to stock or if all stores operate the same way, but this one is definitely not pc friendly.

The one down the street from me has a very small rack that's buried in the corner. The wall of shame. Whenever I look through it people point and laugh. I got X3 Terran COnflict for $10 though. SO it was worth it.

SO I guess WoW is all we have so far. With some possibility for Bioshock and Halo. I'm surpirsed there isn't more Mass Effect love.