Keyrock

I can't say for sure, but I doubt you can open up that slot using leadership. I plan to do it and make a spiffy slotted purple pair of pants (or a shirt) in one foul swoop.

We already know how things will turn out Original: Enhanced:

Not going to look up the specifics, but a single minded human fighter/weapon master is an insane killing machine. Two ways to go, in my opinion. Either scimitar or rapier for insane critical chance, or scythe for insane critical damage. Either way, you'll easily be able to get every feat you could ever possibly want and your chance to hit, number of attacks per round, and damage per attack are going to be so ridiculous that you'll be practically insta-killing even super tough beasties. You'll brute force through even tough damage reduction/absorption spells with childish ease. Plus, great armor and good hit points for survivability. Augment with items giving various immunities (e.g. freedom of movement, immunity to mind control, etc.) and you become nearly unstoppable. It's not pretty or fancy, it's the straight up brute force approach, but it's very effective because the steady damage output is just so staggering.

Is it just me, or are uncommon, rare, and epic leadership assets completely useless? Well not USELESS, but they don't have any advantage over their mundane counterparts. I mean, is there any advantage to using a green or blue or purple sword over the mundane rusty sword, or green/blue/purple armor over basic rusty armor? Can you even get a "better result"? In other news, I got my greedy paws on a dragon egg, but I'm reluctant to use it until I get at least blue tools. I'm also closing in on getting a rank 7 dark enchantment and rank 7 azure enchantment. At the moment I have 3 rank 6 dark and 2 rank 5 dark, just 2 more rank 5 dark and I'll have enough to fuse a rank 7. I have 1 rank 6 azure, and 3 rank 5 azure, so a bit further to go with that. I'm not even going to attempt to fuse a rank 8, that will just take forever.

Here's a decent chunk of my afternoon/evening yesterday: Step 1: Decide to fire up Jade Empire Step 2: Open up Steam and select game Step 3: Error message Step 4: Google Step 5: Come to find out a metric ****ton of people have this problem Step 6: Find proposed solution Step 7: Implement proposed solution Step 8: Error message Step 9: Find another proposed solution Step 10: Implement proposed solution Step 11: Error message Step 12: Find another, more drastic proposed solution Step 13: Implement proposed solution Step 14: Reboot Step 15: Error message Step 16: FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU Step 17: **** the dumb ****, I'm downloading a ****ing crack Step 18: Implement downloaded crack Step 19: Play game Step 20: Try to enjoy myself as I wonder why I had to implement an illegal crack to play a game I ****ing legally bought

Not really, no. Depends entirely on your preference, as you point. It's not a fact that a controller is better. A controller has clear advantages that translate directly to a racer: 1) Analog steering, allowing you to steer more or less depending on how far you move the thumbstick. With a keyboard it's all or nothing. 2) Analog triggers, allowing you to feather the throttle. Again, with a keyboard it's all or nothing. Even if we're comparing with a controller that doesn't have analog triggers, as some don't, the analog steering itself is a massive advantage. Obviously at this point you're only arguing for the sake of arguing, because stating that m&kb is just as good for racers as a controller is just plain ridiculous. Same goes for platformers. That would be like me arguing that a controller is just as good for a RTS as m&kb.

No, it works better with a steering wheel, gear box, and pedals. The long, long, long history of platformers on the PC shows that a mouseyboard has no problems with platformers. 1) Yes steering wheel it the best tool for the job, but that doesn't change the fact that a gamepad is still WAY better for a racing game than m&kb. Ever played a racer, or even a game that has driving like GTA with m&kb? Sucks, doesn't it? 2) Take a platformer, either 2D or 3D, and put it in front of 100 people. Now offer them either m&kb or a controller. I guarantee that at least 95 of them pick the controller. You can make a platformer work with m&kb, but you will never convince me that that either WASD or the arrow keys are more comfortable for platforming than an analog stick, or even a D-Pad. Point is, as it concerns TW3, that the extra precision and extra buttons of m&kb don't really help because of enemy lock on and limited number of skills/spells. If you're more comfortable with m&kb and the keyboard layout is better suited to you that's your prerogative, but it doesn't make m&kb better for the job, it just makes it better for you. I find it easier and more natural to switch between enemies with the analog stick and I find myself pushing the wrong button a lot less on a controller because the buttons aren't as crammed together as on a keyboard. With the advantages of m&kb rendered meaningless, it basically boils down to what control method any given person is more comfortable with.

Yeah, I overstated myself when I said a controller was a better tool for the job for The Witcher, it would have been more appropriate for me to say that it's just as good a job. All of the advantages of m&kb don't really apply to The Witcher games: 1) Faster, more precise aiming - Doesn't really apply since Geralt isn't an archer. In TW1 you only kind of sort of had to have the enemy somewhere in the neighborhood of directly in front of you to hit them, and in the case of groups you just used group stance with which it didn't matter at all where the enemies were as long as you were in melee range. They could be directly behnd you and you'd still hit them. 2) Far larger number of buttons/keys - Geralt doesn't have a large enough array of special abilities/signs to make more than 12 keys necessary. If you're more comfortable with m&kb then it may feel better for you to use that than a controller. I know when I first started playing my second playthrough of TW2 it felt a bit awkward using the controller because I had been used to the m&kb control from my previous playthrough. It took me a little while to adjust, but once I did it felt better than m&kb. I guess it comes down to preference. I just don't think designing the game around a controller takes away from the m&kb experience. Geralt isn't going to have enough skills and spells to warrant 20 hotkeys anyway and he doesn't really use ranged attacks that require precision aiming. I mean, I suppose they could make Igni and thrown daggers into precision aiming attacks ala third person shooters rather than lock on attacks, I just don't see that adding to the game exoerience.

Sadly, that rule applies for a staggeringly large array of games.

As if you needed to precisely "hit" the opponent in TW1. You could always up the sensitivity of the controller's axes, you know, if the game actually had controller support, so you could turn just as fast with the thumbstick as with the mouse. It would be less precise, but it wouldn't matter one bit because in TW1 just just had to be kind of in the neighborhood to "hit" your opponent. The game didn't have much in the way of hit detection, you hit the mouse button, Geralt swung the sword like a mad acrobat and did a bunch of spin moves or whatever and you "hit" your opponent. Maybe "better" is the wrong word. To me it's much more comfortable to hit buttons with my thumb or shoulder buttons or triggers with my fingers on a 360 controller than push keys on a keyboard, partly because I can lean back in my chair, partly because I can move the controller around with me during those frantic fights where I mimic movements with my body because I'm like that, and partly because I find the likelihood of me hitting the wrong button/key is far lower on a controller than on the keyboard because of how the buttons are spaced out. If you're more comfortable with m&kb then more power to you, I'm sure they'll have perfectly fine m&kb controls, they did for the previous game (except the menus, but that sucked wih ANY control scheme).

Does a racing game work better with m&kb? How about action games like Batman: Arkham or Sleeping Dogs? (both notable for having similar combat systems to TW2) How about a platformer? Does a space sim work better with m&kb than with a flightstick? Mouse & keyboard is clearly superior for certain types of games: FPS, RTS, tactical RPGs, just to name a few. This is not a tactical RPG, it's an action RPG with a third person perspective.

Did you unlock the secret achievements: "muscle ache the next morning" and "why did I think working out would be a good idea?" I'll let you know tomorrow.

Just played a game of bicycle ride. Pretty decent hour and a half single player speedrun. I picked up the Good Workout and Healthy Sweat achievements. Next weekend I'm going to try to go completionist and find all the secret areas.

True, a shame as well Why? Why wouldn't you design the game around the best available tool for the job? Would you be disappointed about space sims being designed around flight sticks? Edit: Heck, even TW1 would have been better with a controller, but it didn't have native support. Using Xpadder can make it work, but you still need m&kb for menus and some rarely used functions.

In my opinion TW2 worked perfectly fine with m&kb, my whole first playthrough was with m&kb and I had zero problems with it, other than the combat being less responsive than I would have liked, but that's the same across all control configurations. Subsequent playthroughs were with a 360 controller, since I found that to be a superior/more comfortable way to play the game.

Agreed, I'm just quoting the interview. Their stance all along has been that they want to deliver the same level of quality across all platforms, which is good. Just as long as the PC version doesn't become a second class citizen, I'm fine with it. I'm sure a controller is what they're building around, they should, the type of game this is just naturally plays better with a controller, it's the best tool for the job. Geralt isn't an archer so there's no advantage to mouse aiming and he doesn't have a large enough array of spells that he needs 20 different hotkey slots. The combat system, at least in the second game, is clearly inspired by Batman: Arkham, which is a good model for them to ape since Geralt has similarly semi-superhuman fighting skills to Batman and a small array of signs and tricks, similar to Batman's gadgets. That kind of combat system just works better on a controller, you can make it work fine with m&kb, but it will always feel more natural on a controller. I don't consider building around a controller some kind of affront to PC gaming, I would imagine that the vast majority of hardcore PC gamers have one. It's a rather standard peripheral that has been around for decades. With that said, it does make me feel better that they're currently focusing on PC development. In the end that may not mean anything and it's just a placebo I drank down with a glass of water, but I like feeling better so I'll accept the placebo and like it. As for their interface in TW2, it wasn't ANYTHING friendly. That needs a major overhaul for any and all platforms.

From the video at 7:23:

Who in their right mind would pay for a Dandelion spin-off title? /points thumbs at self This guy. Other thoughts on interview: Board & sword? Since when does Geralt use a shield? Shields are for pansies... and regular humans that don't have superhuman agility and reflexes. //slaps interviewer Lead development platform - PC **** yes!

Playing Legends of Dawn. The game is so clunky and unpolished, yet I find myself going back to it. I don't know how difficult it would be to implement, but a follow camera option would go a long way toward making the game a more user friendly experience. Anyway, the closest comparison for the game is Divine Divinity, but a bit less loot em' up and more cRPG than that. I do kind of like the system for collecting runes for opening chests.

Legends of Dawn is a game that has all the features and components in place, but zero polish, none, zip, nada. The game plays like a beta (an early one at that) rather than a finished game. You can also tell it's made by an inexperienced team by a lot of the design choices. There are some cool things in the game but they're not necessarily implemented particularly well. Very little is explained, a few of the tooltips are actually helpful but many are pretty much useless. It's a game that hands you a bunch of stuff and says "figure it out", which is fine for me but will surely be a turn off for many people. The game, in many ways, plays like something at least a decade old, with some of the good and definitely much of the bad that comes with that. There's a bunch of neat ideas in there, but a lot of the implementation could have been much better. This is a cake that definitely needed to sit several more months in the oven. Still, it's got a weird clunky charm to it and I'm looking forward to playing it some more when I get home.

Saints Row is wonderfully crude, sexist, immature, over the top, and absurd. It's a game series that looks at the politically correct folks, unzips its pants, whips out its ****, and taunts them with it. It glorifies sex and violence, but it does so in such an absurdly over the top manner that no one could possibly ever take any of it seriously.

So far, mind you I only played for a few minuted, the graphics are straight out of 2006 and the game seems quite rough around the edges. The "story" seems like the prototypical "find the mythic artifact to save the world" crap that's been done a billion times over. The controls seem fairly awkward, though I haven't tried remapping anything yet. I guess I'll get used to it eventually. So basically, not exactly knocking my socks off right now, but I'm barely scratching the surface. Anyway, I'll report back once I get deeper. Look forward to hearing more. I already have it downloaded but can't play till Tuesday. If its decent that'll be enough for me till now till other games start rolling out and maybe with a couple patches it'll be better. It's pretty rough. Tooltips are either nonexistent or pretty much useless, there's some stutter, it's crashed a couple of times Yet I'm kind of enjoying it so far, for whatever reason.

Now that I actually have armor I'm going to stick with, I'll likely invest in some dyes eventually. Not sure the colors yet. Black always works.

So far, mind you I only played for a few minuted, the graphics are straight out of 2006 and the game seems quite rough around the edges. The "story" seems like the prototypical "find the mythic artifact to save the world" crap that's been done a billion times over. The controls seem fairly awkward, though I haven't tried remapping anything yet. I guess I'll get used to it eventually. So basically, not exactly knocking my socks off right now, but I'm barely scratching the surface. Anyway, I'll report back once I get deeper.

I agree with Drudanae, the combat in Mirror's Edge is garbage. Just because the blues are easy to defeat doesn't make the system any good. It's not what the game was built around, it's built around running.