IndiraLightfoot

Absolutely! I'm enjoying myself thoroughly. Despite those five hours, I have merely moved on the overland map twice, and I have solved but a few quests. I'm clicking on everything, reading everything; I'm a slowpoke in a first playthrough like this. Most encounters and combat have been pretty nice, with skills and resources being carefully balanced. It took a while to get used to the UI - and also to the fact that you can rotate the camera - everything is 3D, obviously - which can be important if you'd like to see and find most stuff there is, like me. Obviously, the Z-button highlights important objects, but still.

MrBrown: That soaring high toughness is bananas!

My five-hour-into-the-game report: -There are plenty of quirky humour in among some pretty terrifying events. -I have let on board a few NPC now and then, and they are pretty fleshed out, and triggers here and there have them say stuff about the environs too. -I love that there are critical successes and critical failures. If you mess up some computer code on a safe badly, then no soup for you! -The music is very good and fitting for this post-apocalyptic theme -Ammo is scarce. I'd advice you to have back-up weapons on most of your characters -The story so far is entertaining. It's not mind-blowing or brilliant, but it's certainly good enough. -A pretty big annoyance in the game: You can toggle party-selected and individual-selected. Often, however, you forget about that, which leads to my entire party firing at something, and if stuff like that happens three times in a row, your party is out of ammo. It's my fault, I know, but I need to see a clearer sign of it being the entire party taking the same action.

I've been playing it for two hours +. My thoughts so far: -Great dialogue, cool NPCs -The game accommodates for most actions, even weird ones, like trying to dig up a fresh grave! -I picked "Seasoned" for difficulty, and combat so far has been deceptively simple (in reality, it has quite some depth to it) -Nice traps and skill checks everywhere, including cool secrets -Non-combat skills matter a lot! -The crafting/repairs/jammed systems are so far better than in F:NV -Most actions you take, as well as most choices (even at level-ups, picking attributes and skills), always come at a cost -Beautiful areas, cool ambient sound effects - I reckon, judging by what I've seen so far, this game exceeds what Shadowrun Returns achieved, including Dragonfall.

Done! Cya laterz! WL2, here I come! ------------------------------>

IT*S DOWNLOADING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yay! Steam is fixed again after over an hour! Bad news: No WL2 is downloading.

Or not! Steam has been down in these parts of Europe for like an hour now! EDIT: I turned this into something positive and have started planning my four-team party, using the manual.

Watching the news and crowds of aye-sayers, it's apparent that they're pretty happy anyways. Perhaps this was all for the best. Who wants to wreck the Union Jack, the icon of icons?

I'm so excited and almost juiced up over this release. Any minute now!

Volourn: If they'd entered any publisher office with those things as main selling points for a game they wished to get financed, it would be more than brave, it would be futile.

How about some scientific anthropology? The scientists found that the descendants of Britain's oldest skeleton, Cheddar Man (9,000 years old), actually lived in the same area as the bones were found. Stuff like that makes me dizzy - 300 generations! http://family-tree.co.uk/2013/06/cheddar-man-descendants-reunited/

archangel979: In the best of worlds that would be better, but the herd mentality on the internetz runs amok on a regular basis. For instance, COH2 had a story that somehow insulted the Russians, so hordes of them lowered that user Metascore through the floor. D3 had bad server issues at launch and an auction house - and thousands of armchair critics went bananas and bashed that score into the ground. You get my drift. The best "reviews" are word of mouth or viva voce, like the praise for PST and MotB, for instance.

Let's just say that OE most likely loathe Metacritic. They were low on one lousy point to reach an arbitrary goal the publisher had set up for them using that very site. This was for F:NV. From a Joystiq article: "Business sucks, alright? It's cold and rigid and occasionally unfair. Such is the case with Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas contract with Bethesda, wherein the developer only received royalties if the game matched or exceeded an 85 rating on Metacritic. Leaving aside the fact that Metacritic is a woefully unbalanced aggregation of review scores from both vetted and unvetted publications, agreements like this can leave indie studios -- like Obsidian -- in the lurch should that Metacritic score just barely miss the mark. Unfortunately for Obsidian, Fallout: New Vegas currently has a Metacritic average of 84, a single point below the average that would've earned the company royalties on its product. "[Fallout: New Vegas] was a straight payment, no royalties, only a bonus if we got an 85+ on Metacritic, which we didn't," Obsidian creative director and co-owner Chris Avellone told one Twitter user."

You are so very dedicated, Sensuki. The more you reveal of your commitment, the more respect you should get for where you are now. Unlike you, I've had the honour, as a modder and an avid fan of NWN2, where Josh was the lead designer, to've followed his work under the hood (later, the FNV), and the man is a beast in project management, and he's excellent at meta-designing a CRPG. So, when I've been following the PoE KS, I have done so, safe in the knowledge that it's led by one extremely competent lead designer. For instance, here's a snip from a Codex interview with Josh, from 2007, on NWN2: "If you had a chance to lead the development from the beginning, what would you have done differently? Beware those who come bearing high-minded ideals of what they would do in retrospect. But, since you asked... In terms of designing the OC, I would have gone for something a lot more open-ended, more about exploration and optional content/companions than critical path game length. I also think I would have asked for engineering to focus on revising game logic roadblocks that prevent modders from extending the ruleset. For example, revising the custom spell list data. Revisions to the resource system and the addition of a manager also would have helped a lot. And though I know it would have resulted in a lot of resistance and probably less attention from the media, I would have pushed back as much as possible against replacing the renderer. I just don't think we had the time to do it completely and well. It also really screwed up all of our GUI code and changed all of the art asset pipelines throughout production." I use this quote to show you how very much on the ball Josh is: He cares about modders, about open-ended CRPGs, exploration, optional content, side quests, the time-saving and financial aspects of things, including all phases of production. I do salute him for that, and the fact that he has really listened to the fans of the games he's been making, and he actually don't deserve any crap at all. He needs to be praised more often than he is, that's for sure. Cheers, Josh!

I mean, overall, this game concept is absurdly brave of InXile in some respects: -They are making a text-heavy game -They are cramming it with heavy deep-head stuff: philosophy, ethics, and alternative sociocultural evolutionary strands -They make it so that there's no need for killing stuff whatsoever (at least if playing your cards in particular way) -They focus on plenty of changes your protagonist'll go through, as opposed to a fixed role socio-emotionally, and just have stats change I'm so happy, I'm jumping with joy, but I do expect (and this is not meant in some elitist way) that most players today don't want the stuff I just listed. I can only thank all the backers for this game (most people knew that PST worked despite its shortcomings) and then I'll pray for it to be as good as I hope it will be.

In my first playthrough, I'll try to play it as if the protagonist is me - any decisions I'll try to replicate what I would have done in those situations, ethically and for self-preservation as well as altruistic reasons. It will be like one big psychology test, and then I'll end up in some asylum afterwards.

Yeah, the animations shown so far seem superb, and that other-wordly mood is spot on! On top of the obvious similarities to PST, I also get a darker vibe in the story snippets as well as in the settings we've seen glimpses of, and that vibe is akin to MotB's fantastic areas. With people like Kevin Saunders and George Ziets behind it all, I shouldn't perhaps be surprised at all. All creds to OE, though - they have saved a tonne of development time for InXile by doing all that engine stuff.

Here's a topic where you can post all of those crazy vids of mad survival stunts in traffic from all over the world (for some bizarre reason, it's mostly Russia). I'll start the thread off with two amazing saves from motorcyclists doing incredible things fit for the silver screen: From Brazil, this September: And from Belarus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyS9Z-zEEiU And then from Florida: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58H8lECVoE8

Lexx: I was on it ten minutes before you wrote that, and now I just entered it without any problems again. It sure is up. And Ganrich asked about that on the previous page, check out the help he got there.

I've watched it three times now. Matkina seems to be a very cool companion.

Bayhawk Ales Inc

As long as the VO is good as well as focussed on companions and interesting NPCs primarily, I'm fine with it. Interestingly, the vid, it says that T:ToN is made in the PoE engine, and here we don't see that transparent 3D models over 2D backgrounds issue, and also we see a brave decision of making the text UI centre stage. Given the MotB-ish and PST-ish team behind it, I think we can expect some really interesting stories and dilemmas, not to mention depth to the stuff we encounter and are supposed to deal with in the way we wish.

Prediction: GOTC! (C being Century) That vid was spectacular. The music, the atmosphere, the cool environments, the weird props, the read-your-text-nerd-UI, the lot! I loved it all. So far, I don't regret backing this game hard, like in among the top hundreds (foolish and desperate, but it seems it was for a good cause).

I've played far too few classes yet to tell which one is my favourite. The cipher and the monk classes are the nicest so far, and rogue wasn't what I hoped for, and nor was fighter. After the next update, I think I'll try the druid out.