Keyrock

Subtlety and nuance are not exactly BioWare's forte, not these days, anyway.

/shudders There was a time when I didn't hate QTEs (I disliked them, just didn't hate them), then I played the Lara Croft Murder Simulator. Ugh, I hope they keep the QTEs to a minimum. I unfortunately don't envision hand to hand happening any other way, unless they splurge for developing and implementing a full fledged combat system, which seems unlikely for a low-budget title where combat is (hopefully) a very small part of the game.

I backed it on their website. http://fund.precinctgame.com/ $1 gets you the game. Just need 393,556 more people to donate a buck, and it's good to go. Man, I really want this one to happen. There aren't enough good police games out there. I'll eventually give them what I planned on giving them for the Kickstarter. I'll almost certainly back it on their website too. I share your sentiment about police games, and I mean police games where you follow procedure and do detective work, not just shooters where you happen to be wearing a badge.

Yeah, that's the same meaning I got out of it too. It makes sense for Torment since that is planned to have a far more focused narrative, where as I expect Wasteland 2 to be more free-form.

I'm not sure that's a good assumption to make about the gaming community... present company excluded, of course. I do like how everything is all about writing story and characters from the ground up and the gameplay elements will be fitted around that, not the other way around. It all sounds great, I hope they can deliver. /tries not to get hopes up too high //fails Edit: As an aside, I'm reading through the Numenera Core Book right now and it makes me think that this game will have to be turn-based (certainly not a bad thing in my opinion), or at least it would work a lot better with turn-based. Numenera's effort mechanic, which is very much at the core of the system, seems like it would be difficult to properly implement in real-time. I mean, I guess it's possible.

The Player's Guide is pretty nice so far. I wasn't quite ready to spring for the full (dead tree) guidebook at $60 bucks, but I'm considering it now. Yeah, I'm only about 40 pages or so into the core book so far, but I'm really liking the system, it seems very flexible, fairly simple, yet gives you a lot of control over your actions. I like the idea of being able to apply extra effort into actions whenever you feel the need to, but it draining your stat pool and leaving you with less to work with and more vulnerable as the encounter progresses. Obviously I can only speculate as to how well it will work until I actually put it into use in a campaign (whether as a GM or a player).

Neck bones? Neck bones. I'm going to hunt a bit more near Skadovsk so that I can afford more ammo for my SVD Lynx (I have 20 rounds right now), then I'll try to solo the merc camp mission. I suppose I could go there at night and get the intel sneaky style with no bloodshed, but now that I got a SVD in my hands, I think I'm going to kill them, all of them, no mercy style (they sure wouldn't show me any). I 'll just need to find a good spot, with a bit of cover and a tree or rock to duck behind to reload, far enough away so they can't reach me with their assault rifles and grenades and waste them as they try to advance on my position. If they happen to have a sniper or two in their midst then we'll just have to see who the better shot is. I'll likely burn through all my ammo, but the gear I pick up off their corpses should more than buy all of it back and it's a relatively easy trek back to Skadobsk from there and I can stop and rest at Noah's in case of blowout.

The in-game art looks great.

Woohoo! After hunting down some artifacts I earned enough cash to buy a sniper rifle from Nimble and wound up with a Dragunov SVD "Lynx". On the down side, that rifle costs a lot of money to maintain and the ammo is quite expensive too. It's worth it though, because it's ruthlessly accurate, has great range, and the ammo will pierce pretty much anything. It's a MASSIVE step up from the 1891 I was stuck with since the beginning of the game. It's on like neck bones now.

You can create your Saint Row IV character now and import them into the game when it comes out: http://www.destructoid.com/create-your-saints-row-iv-character-now-259499.phtml Sweet, I'm going to fiddle around with customizing my US President when I get home.

This looks like about as Metroid clone as Metroid clone gets. I'm not against being influenced by one of my favorite game series ever and using some of its design ideas, but some of the stuff looks like it was ripped straight out of Metroid, like the spinning jump, the doors, and some of the enemies. Hopefully much of the art is placeholder and will be revamped in a more unique style with the funding, otherwise I could see an incoming lawsuit.

On the plus side, they got The Safety Dance. I'll mostly be rocking my own tunes (assuming Mixtape returns) or listening to Klassic anyway. I wish they had more than just one Fryderyk Chopin track, but I guess one is better than none.

That's a rather sizable collection of songs, I imagine most of them are snippets rather than the full song. Gen X, Klassic, KRhyme, and K12 I recognize as stations that have been in every SR game. Hopefully Mixtape (user station) is coming back. I don't see why it wouldn't, but stranger things have happened.

I had just the opposite luck at the Sawmill. The place was so packed with zombies you'd pretty much have to stack them on top of each other to fit any more in there. The zombies weren't the problem, despite the fact that I'm not sure I had even brought enough ammo to deal with all of them. The place is also crawling with dogs. But the real problem is the controller (hopefully it's just one). Those creeps suck on any difficulty, but on Misery Mod difficulty, they will pretty much insta-kil you. I gave it a bunch of tries, but as it stands right now, it's pretty much straight up impossible for me to get in there and get the tools. That place is swarming. I'll have to come back later and hope for better luck (or come packing much better weaponry). On the plus side, on the way back I looted a stalker corpse and several beasties, so at least I got some money out of the trip.

I got the basic tools from the ranger station after killing the group of mercs that was there. That battle took me 4 tries to survive. The key was finding a good defensive position where I had partial cover and close enough to a spot I could retreat to when I had to reload this slow as molasses rifle. I was so ridiculously overloaded with loot off the mercs' bodies that the rather short distance from the station to Stradovsk took me some 5+ minutes to cover because I couldn't walk more than 30 yards before having to stop and rest. The whole time I was just praying "please no blowout, please no blowout, please no blowout". It will be the same thing but with a significantly longer distance and more dangerous terrain when I go to get the tools from the Sawmill and kill some of the zombies there and loot them. On the plus side, killing the zombies should be much easier than killing the mercs, even if there are a lot more zombies.

Part of me worries about how SEGA will ruin Atlus. On the other hand, if they were to make, say, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 3 for PC, then I would hurl my money at them hand over fist.

"We now turn to Buck Stanley with the Freeside Traffic Report. Buck" "Thanks Chip, News Nomad 6 reports a brahmin pile up on I-95. Traffic is stop and go as raiders are on the way to loot the merchants."

Cool. The tools at the Ranger Station will be a breeze. I'm not looking forward to going to the Sawmill and having to kill a horde of zombies. Not that it's difficult. At least I should be able to buy back all the ammo I'll use up killing the zombies withall the gear I'll be able to salvage, it will be a tense and slow trek back to Skadovsk with all that mostly broken gear weighing me down. I finally got a pump-action shotgun. It was just over 50% when I got it and I decided it was worth fixing. It's a little bit less powerful than the break-action I started out with, but I'll gladly give up a bit of stopping power for vastly larger capacity and a little bit faster firing rate.

I hate the fact that "you can kill anyone!" is the gold standard for reactivity. Yes, I recognize that it's a symptom of having combat as your primary gameplay mechanic. But real reactivity, it seems to me, would involve interactions more sophisticated than just kill/don't any character. Like talking? Going into business with? Sharing an apartment? Playing tic-tac-toe? The problem of course is that a lot of these require specific scripting to be done well, unless you go the Fable/Sims route of fake speech. I don't mean that you necessarily do kill these people, I just like that the option is there. I prefer a game to allow me to break it and then have to deal with picking up the pieces rather than making characters invulnerable to avoid said situation. Of course the ability to engage characters in a variety of ways, from violence, to cooperation, to duping, to charming, to intimidation, and so on, is ideal. How many of these could feasibly be programmed in to have real ramifications beyond a line of dialogue or two in a timely manner is the real question, and it seems it's one inXile are trying to answer.

Well, I got the PDF versions of my Numenera books (Core Book & Players Guide). I'll get my physical Numenera Core Book in about 2 weeks. I guess I have a lot of reading to do. /rubs hands together

Just got to the crashed helicopter in the swamp. Had to deal with a couple of Bloodsuckers to make it to it and consequently died a couple of times in the process. Bloodsuckers aren't super tough or anything, but they're a bother to deal with in an open field with tons of shrubs to obscure vision and a break-action shotgun as my best weapon for the job. The best strategy I guess is to let them get almost on you and blast them at point-blank range. Of course, if the timing or aim is off... death. Man, I need some better weaponry in a bad way. I kinda wish I had kept that AKS-74. It would have swiss-cheesed those Bloodsuckers.

The dead soldier near the crashed helicopter on top of the plateau has a scoped AKS-74 that's in very good condition, plus a bunch of ammo for it. He also has a lightly modified Makarov pistol. I kept the pistol because I need something I can use while holding a flashligh. The Makarov is weak, but it's better than nothing. I sold the assault rifle so that I could afford the PMK gasmask. It's a decent rifle, but not my thing since I'm a sniper. It's easy enough to get to Noah, and on top of the plateau you'll most likely only have to deal with several snorks. It's not too hard if you're careful, though I still died a while bunch of times trying to get through the burning field and once to the snorks. I wasn't paying enough attention, I deserved to die.

Nah, all I had was a heavy overcoat and a headwrap. Now I've traded in the headwrap for a PMK gasmask. Still not exactly great protection from the environment, but better than what I had before. Also, the Dragunov is not there (past the Sawmill), as suspected. Oh well. It will probably be a while until i get a decent rifle.

Wouldn't you need cars, functional ones, to have traffic?

I sold bloodsucker meat for 277 RU each. To be honest, I didn't notice the economy changes until you brought it up. I don't think it makes the game easier or cheapens the experience at all. Money is still very tight. I just did the jump into the anomaly deal and got to the crashed chopper on top of the plateau. It took me some 6 tries to correctly repeat Noah's pattern and get through the burning area safely, and by safely I mean damaged but survived. With the gear I looted off the dead soldier I should be able to afford some head gear with a breathing apparatus. Part of me want to save the money to get a better sniper rifle, but I think the headgear is more important at this point. I desperately need to raise my resistance to radiation and poison. I should check to see if the Dragunov you can get for free early in the game is there in the Misery Mod. I doubt it, but it's worth a look. Upgrading from the 1891 to the Dragunov would make one heck of a difference.