Keyrock

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.

The dice rolling thing is a gimmick. That said, it's a really really freakin' cool gimmick and I wants it. Also, in-game footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLMjEMl3Ssk

That he wants to move on and try something else? Here is the thing, if he wants to try something else within the field of gaming then why not use his company. Has gaming gotten so corporate that a man doesn't own his own company anymore? I still remember when Id was a small studio and I loved the everliving **** out of Doom. I guess I just had different expectations for this industry while I was growing up and it is a bit sad to see the way the wind is blowing. If he on the other hand is dropping out to focus on the craft of origami then I totally support his choice, even if I don't like origami. That's correct. It's owned by ZeniMax.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if Raven's Cry wound up being great. For one thing, I'm definitely down with pirate themed games and movies, even if the genre has gotten saturated as of late. For another, Reality Pump is a company from the motherland, so by blood I am compelled to like them. It's just that they haven't made a halfway decent game as of yet, in my opinion.

If popular culture has taught me anything it's that seeking eternal life never ends well, whether via magic ritual, cloning, or uploading your consciousness into a machine. There's like a 99.98% probability that at some point you will go completely insane and try to extinguish all forms of life, sentient or otherwise.

90% sure it will be better than Risen 2. It's made by Reality Pump, I'm 90% sure it will be garbage.

This was only a matter of time. I don't know if I'm glad or sad by all the game legends leaving their companies. id hasn't exactly been setting the world on fire the past decade or so, it was time for Carmack to move on. They can make mediocre shooters just fine without him. Oculus Rift is a far more exciting project than anything id has done since Quake 3, maybe longer. His talents are better served working on that.

I would argue that "as far removed from P:T as possible" would be a multiplayer-only, microtransaction-based, first-person view flash kart racer set in the present real world and running in a browser.

This is pretty doggone awesome: https://twitter.com/BrianFargo/status/404088811115659264/photo/1 It's even olive green, one of my absolute favorite colors. I may just have to get a toaster repair shirt.

This was only a matter of time.

It's explained pretty darned clearly right there where you vote: RTwP TB This information isn't hidden, it's right there in front of people's faces when they vote. Indeed, but then a lot of people must not have stopped to read those. They see "turn-based" and think "Baldur's Gate" because Baldur's Gate emulates a turn-based system - the confusion on semantics was present in this very discussion here, just head over to the comments page and see what many "supporters of TB" claim are valid arguments to support it. As long as the necessary information is available and presented clearly, and it is, the vote is legit. If people fail to read or comprehend clearly stated explanations and vote in ignorance, that's their own fault. /shrugs