Keyrock

Scooped up Drakensang: River of Time for 75% off. Time for an old-school cRPG romp. /rubs hands together

Heh, for once the user and critic scores match up.

And so it has begun. The Steam Autumn Sale is upon us. Skyrim is 75% off while the Legendary Edition is 66% off and the DLCs individually are 50% off. That's the steepest discount on Skyrim I've seen so far.

Everyone's idea of the perfect length game will be a bit different, and will likely change from game to game, I know it does for me. A game being quite lengthy yet constantly engaging and entertaining is the hallmark of good design. For example, GTA: San Andreas took me well over 50 hours to complete, yet I loved every second of it and actually felt compelled to look for hidden stuff and steal all the cars, not because of some drive to get an achievement (I don't give a flying **** about achievements), but because I was enjoying it. I've (unfortunately) played plenty of other games that only took 4 or 5 hours to complete and they bored me to tears, making those 4 or 5 hours feel like 30. I think variety is the key. If you're constantly doing the same exact thing again and again and again, it's going to wear you out and grind (pun very much intended) you down. Grinding through trash mobs in filler battles completely sucks the enjoyment out of a game for me, and since trash mobs generally don't present any actual challenge and can be simply brute forced, developers all too often fall into the trap of simply making you face larger quantities of trash mobs to make the battle more challenging, which only compounds the problem. Some of the tedium of grinding through trash mobs can be alleviated a bit by allowing you to pull off different combos while mopping up trash mobs. That's part of what makes games like Batman and Sleeping Dogs work, letting you pull off cool looking combos that make you feel like a badass while you're mopping up waves of trash mobs, but even that only goes so far and the filler battles become just plain tedious after a while.

Out of morbid curiosity, why? To develop a good sense of taste you have to learn the good and the bad and why they are. It's true. What I learned from DA2: Shockingly, lather, rinse, repeat combat facing wave after wave of trash mobs is not fun. In fact, it straight up sucks ass. Who knew?

That's actually a really reasonable price. Same price as a XBone and significantly more raw horsepower, granted it doesn't have a camera to look at your pen1s. If this piece of hardware allows you to install other operating systems, it is hell of a good price... I don't see why not, neither does Valve. The one thing they don't mention in the article is the CPU, but that's not all that relevant for someone looking to just buy a box off the shelf, plug it in, and not mess with it. For a single mid-level GPU gaming setup the CPU is mostly irrelevant provided it doesn't bottleneck the GPU, and even a $60 or $70 AMD CPU won't bottleneck a R9 270.

Wait, you're surprised about this? This is the direction that gaming is headed and has been for years. I estimate we're only a year or two away from games coming out with a special edition you can buy for a cool $20 more where you don't get the game at all, but instead you automatically are awarded all the achievements so that you can show off your SKILLZ and your ePen1s can grow.

iBuyPower shows off Steam Machine Protoype, Names Price That's actually a really reasonable price. Same price as a XBone and significantly more raw horsepower, granted it doesn't have a camera to look at your pen1s.

Heh. I enjoyed the hell out of the "Enter the Dominatrix" DLC. Agreed. Like most of their DLCs the value for the (full) price is questionable at best, on account of its (lack of) length, but it definitely brought plenty of LULZ. I like LULZ. This next DLC looks like it will be worth it for the sweater alone: That sweater it pretty dang fabulous.

Ha! This is me, too. If I can't get *any* character names out of the dozen or so I have in a list, (literally, I keep them in a list, ), I just give up. I'm just trying to come up with a proper sounding name, but if the game insists on a nonsensical one.. This is the internet. Your name must look something like this: xXKrAzYgUrL681Xx

So they finally got enough reviews for Metacritic to give them a score. /drum roll 28/100 LOL, that's dangerously close to Leisure Suit Larry Box Office Bust territory, though still nowhere near Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing territory. It's currently the 34th worst rated PC game ever on Metacritic. Granted, I'm sure that score will change over time.

Derrick Rose is out for the rest of the season... again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ytCEuuW2_A

Still going on: Indf/RTwP/TB 684/6331/6582 I hear the TB fans are voting via an orderly queue but its taking a lot of time to get through; on the other side, some joker yelled out "SPACE BAR" around the RTwP fans and now they're stuck waiting for someone to yell it again.

I'm definitely a fan of Atlus, due in no small part to my hard on for MegaTen games. The fact that they have an awesome mascot And that they like to troll their customers makes me like them even more. That dungeon crawler for 3DS will likely be pretty boss too. Hopefully they make another Devil Survivor game in the near future. That's my favorite MegaTen spinoff.

Agreed. inXile is not bound by this vote, they have clearly stated that repeatedly. This is simply to gauge the preferences of its backers and either reaffirm their own choice (turn-based) or make them rethink their plan before they put it into action in case the vote goes overwhelmingly toward RTwP. The way it's looking, it's very likely going to reaffirm their own choice, so it looks like everything worked out. That kind of tediousness comes from failed encounter design. Encounter is not well planed if it don't give player any challenge but exist only to make game longer. RTwP games aren't immune to this kind of encounter designs which PS:T works as fine example. Even so, Planescape with turn based system would have been even more tedious. And I wouldn't say that fighting several critters that only provide a minor challenge is generally failed design. What's certain is that these kind of fights are far more enjoyable and "flowish" to play (and to watch) in RTwP games than in turn based games. Grinding through trash mobs is never fun, in any type of combat systems. Even in loot em ups grinding through trash mobs is boring and tedious (boss and champion fights are fun, though), and those games are specifically built around grinding through hundreds and hundreds of mobs. What makes grinding through trash mobs in loot em ups bearable is the promise of some cool loot randomly dropping off one of them, which is why loot em ups are so heavily dependent on striking the right balance of rare loot drop frequency and the quality and uniqueness of the loot itself. More traditional, story-driven RPGs are not nearly as dependent on loot, which leaves picking up a few experience points here and there as the only "joy" to grind through trash mobs. Making experience more bound to quest completion than killing enemies, or eliminating experience from killing enemies altogether, completely gets rid of the need to even have trash mobs at all (which is a very good thing in my book). Anyway, Brian Fargo and Co. have already stated that they will not have filler fights and trash mobs, so any point about which combat system makes grinding through trash mobs more bearable is moot, on account of there not being any trash mobs.

Interesting so now we are judging developers when they are too interactive with fans, so its lose lose for them. Because if they hadn't had the poll people would be saying " I backed the game but I had no say in the combat which is important " The vast majority of people are quite pleased with the interactivity of the project and the direction it is headed in. It's always those children that toss the toys down as hard as they can and go crying to mommy that make the biggest noise.

Still going on: Indf/RTwP/TB 684/6331/6582

LOL, the NFC North didn't win a single game this week, and 2 of the teams played each other! In other news the Cowboys actually came through in the clutch, even after getting screwed by the refs on an absolutely atrocious call (catch by Dez at the 5). The end in nigh!

I do. His name is B**** F****. Bruce Finey? Brice Folen? Bubba Frost?

Absolutely.

inXile has nothing to do with BGEE whatsoever. Back to the combat conversation. To me good combat doesn't take away from narrative but add to it. If the battles are few and far between and meaningful, as they promise, then I'm fully in favor of robust tactical combat, even if it is slow paced. Look at it this way, when reading a novel it would get pretty freakin' boring if every few pages they went into descriptions of filler mob battles where the protagonists just brute force their way through some goblins or whatever.However reading about a tactical back and forth battle where the protagonists are pushed to their limits and forced to outsmart their opponents can be quite thrilling and really adds to the story because that's an actual difficult obstacle to overcome that requires brains as well as brawn.

Tweaking the companion AI in NWN2 does most definitely help, but there is no combination of options that makes AI driven companions not idiots, you can only make them somewhat less idiotic. You can get it to the point that it's fine for filler fights, but major battles will always require micromanaging, at least if you're playing on Hardcore D&D difficulty (like I always do) or higher.

It kind of makes sense from both sides. id is a software developer, and one highly focused (on FPS games), they don't make hardware. Also, ZeniMax may be quite wary of investing considerable time and money into developing a hardware peripheral, because, you know, that worked out so well for THQ. Carmack maybe wants to do something else than developing FPS games and game engines since he's been doing that for over 20 years and when you do something for that long, you can fall into a rut and stagnate on the creativity front (the last couple id titles seem to support this theory).

Just because a game is story-driven doesn't mean you can't have tactical combat as well. They've already stated that the combat will be sparse and meaningful (no waves of filler trash mobs to grind through), and that most, if not all, of it will be avoidable, but it's still important to make the little bit of combat that's in the game as engaging as possible. They shouldn't gloss over combat just because it's not at the center of the game, that would lead to having garbage combat like in P:T, and I don't think anyone wants that, regardless of which side of the RTwP/TB fence they're on.

Exactly, they haven't started production yet, and likely won't until Wasteland 2 ships, or at least gets to the point where they can pull most of their production team off of it. So far they've been purely in pre-production. I surmise the point of this vote is to make sure that turn-based won't be overwhelmingly negatively received. inXile plans to make the game turn-based, but before they start production they want to make sure they wouldn't be pissing off the majority of their backers. My guess is they have a rough plan of how to adapt the Wasteland 2 combat system to the Numenera ruleset, and as long as the vote doesn't wind up being overwhelmingly skewed toward RTwP, and that looks very highly doubtful at this point, they will move ahead with it.