Agiel

Running my stream of Origins right now. For those who are interested. my stream url is as follows: twitch.tv/lamashtu Going to be playing on hard as a City Elf rogue, cos 'eff those Dalish, Kallian Tabris is original gangsta baby.

I had kind of wondered how the world or Arcanum would turn out when it entered the age of precision guided munitions, C4ISR, advanced composite materials, and general push-button warfare.

That it will, though it will have more in common with Mass Effect 3's than say, Neverwinter Nights'. That said, I did have a real good time with the multiplayer of Mass Effect 3. A Neverwinter Nights-style editor would have been lovely though.

Doctrine overview for Hearts of Iron IV. Of note is AirLand Battle and Shock and Awe being a thing nearly forty years early: I do also like the "Desperate Defense" doctrine icon that shows a man in a wheelchair with a Panzerfaust.

Largely ambivalent to romances in Bioware games to be honest. There's no law in my book that says the romanceable characters are terrible, but I think when that option is absent the Bioware writing team has the time to make a character shine on their own two feet. Examples being (I omit their DnD works, since I feel that romances weren't quite their hat back then): KOTOR 1: -Canderous -HK-47 -Jolee Mass Effect: -Wrex -Mordin -Legion -James Vega Dragon Age: -Sten -Oghren -Varric -Aveline

To pass the time until Inquisition, I decided to do a stream of Dragon this weekend either on Friday or Saturday morning United States PST, depending on when I get my streaming set-up squared away. It will entail about all of Origins the canonical DLC as well, and I will not be streaming Dragon Age 2, as hopefully the Dragon Age Keep will stand-in for that experience. What it will entail: -Idle musings of the series and vidya games in general. -Me breaking the game through tons and tons of mods (none of it romance or sex-related, I assure you) and the odd exploit or two. -Suffering performance anxiety and stage fright from streaming seriously for the first time. -No romancing, since my lady city elf rogue thinks boys have cooties (sorry, Bruce). If it all pans out and I (somehow) get a decent amount of regular viewers I think I have a couple of other games lined up to stream including, but not limited to: -STALKER -Falcon BMS 4.32 -Deus Ex: Human Revolution -Steel Beasts -...and many more!

What drew my attention most was Bioware milking the whole "make the 'elite' enemies ginormous" gameplay trope for all its worth. That, and it would not be totally out of my place to play the stock sonar "pinging" noise whenever I'm using the "find lootable stuff" mechanic while exploring. Otherwise, still very much interested.

Kind of what I was trying to say. For Origins you had to have Awakening in order to get a pot that lets you respec, and the DLC store for DA2 had the pot for that as well. There was no other way to respec with the base games.

Hopefully there's some way of respeccing not associated with any DLC like previous offerings of the Dragon Age series.

I think it's been said that Bioware wants it released about a month before the release of Inquisition proper, which would make it middle of this month.

So not only does she have great dimensions, but she's a medical professional you say? Though I'm afraid she'll have to get in line behind Blizzard asking for the password to my non-existent World of Warcraft account and the job offers to earn $500 an hour working from the comfort of my home desk.

I've yet to receive my invite. I suspect putting myself down as a super hardcore gamer actually worked against my favour. I even vainly attempted to find an invite in my spam inbox, alas, it was not in there. Incidentally, a 28-year old woman named Olga from Saint Petersburg, Russia is "[sic]very interested in acquaintance making."

A German guy who hangs out on our TeamSpeak (a big tank nut, and quite proudly German, which means he's a bit like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster) had this as his signature:

I feel that like religious nuts, Randists believe that somehow absolute faith in their dogma secures their fate against oblivion. Oblivion in this case being an existence of mediocrity working a nine-to-five job as an office drone, wherein every day you stand in the shower regretting the decisions you made in life.

Looked up an article the Navy's newest destroyer, DDG-1000 Zumwalt, and I couldn't help but notice one tiny detail in the caption for one image. Care to guess what it was? Original article here: http://www.defensenews.com/interactive/article/20140928/DEFREG02/309280017/Meet-Zumwalt-US-Navy-s-Stealth-Destroyer-Will-Go-Sea-Next-Spring

I believe it has been said they would not be releasing such a thing or a demo ("Demo? Wot's dat?"), though this is information that I only learned secondhand. However, considering they did not release it for Dragon Age 2 that's something I would say with fairly high confidence will not happen.

Some Space Marines that contract pneumonia from poor fitting uniforms: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/8203978/Russias-too-thin-designer-uniform-leads-to-pneumonia-and-flu.html http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21017915

There was a great one that depicted the birth of NO MA'AM, but I believe it's been taken down. That said, this is a riot as well:

This a thousand times. Could the Soviet Union have defeated the Germans without the West's assistance? I would go so far as to say it was quite likely, yes. However, how many more would have perished were it not for the P-39 Airacobra's the US donated to the USSR to give the Soviets valuable air cover after their air force was decimated in the initial stages of Barbarossa? How many more would have died were it not for radios that made their revolutionary Deep Battle doctrine possible? How many more lives would it cost, and months if not years would it take without the contribution of jeeps, trucks, and personnel carriers to turn the Red Army into a truly mechanised armed force? In fact, the most favoured chariot of the war-winning Katyusha rocket artillery pieces was the Studebaker 6 and a Half Ton truck (the Soviets found it so dependable that they even made the company honorary Heroes of the Soviet Union). To say nothing of the not insignificant contribution of combat rations (however distasteful C-rations are, calories are calories) medical supplies. Sure they could have done it without Lend-Lease, but they probably wouldn't have been the ones to put foreign flag atop the Reichstag.

Last physical game I purchased was Armoured Core V: Verdict Day for the Xbox 360, back in Sept 2013. Last physical PC game I purchased was Divinity 2: Ego Draconis back in 2009

Half expected it to be the case myself, even if I did hold out hope that we would see the Origins PC in Inquisition. There were lots of voice options for the PC (granted it was only generic combat banter), meaning that Bioware would have had to record tons of lines for all the different potential voices players could have chose from Origins, unless they simply went with recording at best one set of dialogue for each of the races. Then there was the dialogue choices through which players could shape the Warden's personality, though those choices didn't really have any bearing on how people reacted to your PC in the game, nor were these choices likely flagged for a future installment of the series (unlike 2 in which the game actively tracked the bias of dialogue choices and adjusted reactions to Hawke and even his/her party banter dialogue accordingly).

So apparently it has been confirmed by Mark Darrah that the Grey Warden you played as in Origins will *NOT* be making an on-screen appearance in Inquisition (though you will apparently hear of him/her, which kind of leaves us in the same boat we were in in 2), which is kind of a huge bummer for me and my chaotic good lady city elf duelist rogue. And you know what? Cole doesn't seem so bad anymore when he's channeling Van Hellsing or a Witchhunter of the Ordo Hereticus:

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