general_azure

- The epilogue will be a guy in a suit giving a confusing talk that does not make any sense and gives you no indication whether the story is supposed to be complete or if there will be another game. - Before that, you might be given the choice between 3 different endings, all of which consist of blowing everything to pieces. The only difference will be the color of the visual effects. - To expand on a previous post: Unless you make an obscure dialogue choice in the first few minutes, your party will somehow end up in Proxima Centauri and everyone dies. This only happens roughly 20h into the game, of course. - Your main character is constantly being forced to ask stupid questions about the setting, the answers of which he would absolutely have to know after the first game. - One of the NPCs constantly makes pop culture references, no matter how poorly they fit - None of the female characters gets to wear functional clothing or armor - Last minute overhaul of the magic system: You have to type incantations as text into some input field in order to cast spells. To enforce realism, this field is locked while the game is paused. Typos kill the caster.

I ran through the first game on an ancient GTX460 without noticing any performance issues at all, so I have the distinct feeling that raw hardware power does not have much to do with the issues some people are having. What we're looking at is probably not just regular inefficient code (pointless computational overhead would be slow for everyone) but something more complicated (e.g. crappy memory management on certain driver-card-OS combinations).

Figuring out what can change the nature of a man was pretty brilliant imho.

Was conditioned by the first Baldurs Gate to always prefer a class that can take a beating for my main char and I have a weakness for picking dialogue options with crappy jokes, so I'll probably stick to my smartass paladin.

There are some 6bit character encodings btw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-bit_character_code), but I did not get anything useful from converting the first block into a bitfield and then trying a few of those.

Looks like Base64, but the chunk size is weird. 36bit pieces do not directly translate to anything human readable individually. EDIT: Reaching page 3 made me realize that you guys already tried that =p

... I had started writing up something more elaborate, but that cat just says it better.

What's all that obsession with needing a lot of free space on the deck about? We don't need to march a bloody platoon around on the thing. Many indoor locations are way more space restricted than even a very sleek boat and we don't mind fighting there either.

Well, they did not really bother defending the keep during my absence either, so I currently would not expect too much help from them. Would add some incentive to keep all of the guys in decent gear though.

Xan was awesome, but imho mainly because he was a counterpoint to all the other hyper-motivated regular hero characters I had around (also: moonblade). Bonus points for not being psychotically evil, as some NPCs were wont to do in those days. Having more guys like him around would probably have diluted the appeal though. Also I am not sure I would have stomached extended conversations with that guy, which of course in BG1 was not really an issue...

I'd prefer if classes would not make any distinction about whether the character is my main, mechanics wise. I always had this feeling that if I wanted to have a fully functional paladin in my group it had to be myself, which was kinda unfair towards Pellegina. Did they ever change this in one of the later patches? Might not be quite up to date here.

A stylish tricorne. You might think this one would be a given with the game's setting, but after spending the entirety of Assassins Creed 3 searching for one I am not so sure any more. Also the ability to instruct the companion AI to swap weapons in a specific way (e.g. "discharge the guns in the first 2 weapon slots, then switch to slot 3 and charge"). Note that this is not the same as the way more common "switch to melee weapons when in close combat" AI trigger.

This is not quite as easy as it sounds, you cannot just render the hat over the hair or it might clip through. You can probably cut the hair mesh using the hat surface as a clipping plane, but that's annoying to implement and might still look weird in some cases.

I have the suspicion that part of the reasoning here is that you have to micromanage your casters less if everything is per encounter, because they are less likely to use up a limited resource. There is no obvious way for the AI to know if you want those per-rest spells used right now or saved for the next fight. Of course they still need some system where you can configure the AI on when and how often to empower, but this is probably easier (at least UI-wise) than setting up something similar for individual per-rest spells.

I usually prefer larger parties, but more because of what the NPCs have to say instead of any tactical considerations. You just don't get to know much about the guys you always leave back in camp.