marelooke

Playing through SR3 and having a blast, I'm at 86% completion, did all the city takeover stuff so I'm now alternating between messing with the DLC, doing main story quests and trying to find that one or so collectible I managed to miss so far. The plan is to go back to PoE once I'm done with this one, though I'm sort of tempted to just jump to SR4...

The biggest advantage BG2 mages had were spell triggers and suchlike. Encounter starts and *boom* mage fully shielded, so you already had to have your counters ready. In PoE you can just zerg them and be done with them before they can do anything of note, something that usually didn't work in BG2. And yeah, PoE mages feel particularly underwhelming in the damage department. I'm not big on CC, just nuke stuff to hell please. So I'm kinda disappointed in them really. That said I find PoE compares more with BG1 than BG2: combat starts out hit and miss and annoying until you get a decent size party and mange to fill out all your gear slots with *something*. Mechanics wise I'd rate them BG1 < PoE < BG2 right now, but that might change once I get further in (I'm somewhere in Chapter 2 right now).

I also think the random banter around you isn't subtitled (unless they changed that in the Redux versions) and quite a bit of it is pretty good. (if not for that I'd probably have played it in Russian with English subtitles) Personally game-hopping a bit, mostly playing PoE though with some Diablo 3 and EVE mixed in. The Gog reclaim thing also has me a bit itchy for some S.T.A.L.K.E.R. such a shame that it's unlikely we'll ever see a second installment

Also playing PoE, having some trouble with the combat system. Or maybe starting out as a wizard was a mistake as doing the Temple with two wizards and a fighter was rather a painful affair (at least the second floor was) and I feel like I got through some of the hard fights more by sheer luck than skill (and cheesing them by just unloading everything and heading back for more resting supplies, of course). Enjoying the setting, the art and the dialogue so far but the "aggro" system will have to grow on me (I also dislike having a designated "tank" with "tanking skills", which is something I consider a MMO-ism, but I was aware that was gonna be in, spoke out against it when it was proposed etc, so whatever).

They did this, although they did it as form of Kickstarter update where they reminded people to fill their surveys. Major bummer Even though I read most of them I guess I must've filled out the survey late since my name is quite obviously missing. Sending out a timely reminder by email certainly would have been nice. Oh well, at least we made this awesome game happen

De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum. Disregarding my own advice: I liked it, even though I am rather bad at the combat (and currently stuck somewhere early in because I ran out of things to kill and I gave up getting past the bossfight I need to get past) and I consider quite a few of the mechanics to be clunky. Then again, I'm Flemish, like Larian, so I guess tongue-in-cheek humour, sarcasm, cynicism and black humour are right up my alley...

None of the Half Life games on that list? For shame! No Half-Life? No Duke Nukem 3D? No Quake? No Doom? WTF is this ****ty list? EDIT: Besides we all know that Lord Gaben will give us Half Life 3 > All others Which part of "off the top of my head" do people not understand? It wasn't meant to be a comprehensive list, it's stuff that came to mind without even thinking about it and all those are games I've played somewhat recently, hence they were fresh in my mind. Allow me to add the missing part to my post: On topic, I started playing Civ Beyond Earth and fell victim to the "one more turn"-syndrome. *yawn* stupid alarm clock.

None of the Half Life games on that list? For shame!

That's just *cool*, it totaly gives the sense of Scale that EVE has a hard time providing. Didn't really catch what ship they were flying in (I think it's supposed to be the fighters/fighter-bombers that are generally launched by (super)carriers). But flying alongside all these iconic ships looks pretty damn awesome, it's also pretty cool how the collateral damage of the Doomsday being fired by the Avatar "accidentally" annihilates the player ship, not sure if that was just done for the sake of the clip tho, CCP is pretty good at making awesome clips after all...

If your profile didn't say otherwise I'd think you designed the roads in and around Brussels...

Playing The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, it's a fun game, I really enjoy the banter between Lady Katerina and Van Helsing. Just got to place traps in the Lair for the first time, let's see where things go from here

Liked BD so much I replayed just to get best ending. Controls get better after some minor tweaking. And you sort of get used to them after a while. Though the Howitzer fight was obnoxious, I think I had to slide me mouse to the other end of my desk (actually, I think that's not even that far off...) to turn the goddamn thing 90 degrees. Thankfully it was only that one fight and some creative manoeuvring on my end managed to compensate for the insane inverse acceleration or whatever the hell was going on there. Anyway, I moved on to the next item on my "playthroughs I really ought to finish" list: D:OS. Seems I just suck at the game, I made it to level 6 and I'm having major trouble with the Orc boss on the beach (and can't really see any other way to gain experience, all that is left are a bunch of level 7 undead (and whatever is past them). Guess I need a change of tactics, or party composition, or just keeping my tank alive long enough to keep the boss in melee, because he does far less damage that way, but my tank getting stunned *somehow* (either zapped, knocked over or knocked down) every time kinda puts a dent in that plan. Maybe I need to switch the ranger girl for Madora again. Either way, seems I'm relying far more on luck than tactics which can't really be the idea...

Finished Binary Domain, it was decent. I got the "normal" ending, I guess (both the good and the bad seem to take some deliberate effort to get). The controls were at some points truly infuriating (the howitzer fight especially, but judging from a Youtube video of that fight it's mostly due to terrible porting as the guy seems to be able to turn a lot faster with a controller). I'd be tempted to do another play-through to get the "good" ending but some parts of the game I just don't feel like going through again right now. I also finally finished my F:NV playthrough, only took me 4 years...and I still remembered most of the characters in the ending slides too, so good job on that one Obsidian!

I doubt it will. InXile's smashing success with Torment: Tides of Numenera shows that there is great potential for follow up success, particularly if your first project is well received, which PoE hopefully will be (by the backers, first and foremost, and the press, second). To be fair though, inXile got a lot of flack for trying to launch a second Kickstarter before the first game was done (as such Wasteland 2's success has little or no bearing on the success of the TToN KS imho since it wasn't released when that KS ended). On topic, they've shuffled a bit with the stretch goals: enhanced music was added to the companion stretch goal, which was subsequently reached (which imho was a smart move, while companions are neat and stuff "more music" is a bit higher on my "do want"-list), hopefully they'll reach the Dynamic SFX goal too. Don't care much for the translations (I don't think I've ever played a game in my mother tongue, even if it was available), I can see the appeal of translating a game (not everybody understand English, after all), but I fail to see the appeal of it as a strech goal for the majority of backers.

After trying to get into the game on and off I've started another D:OS playthrough, damn the game has come a long way since the original release, I especially like how there's now a companion for each major archetype (Mage, Ranger, Warrior and Thief) and the game in general feels "smoother" (but maybe that's because this time I'm playing on my desktop...) Has anyone tried the new Resident Evil: Revelations? I'm kinda curious as to how it holds up. Or are you all also waiting for it to be released in its entirety before touching it?

Trying to get through Binary Domain, it's one of those games I love to hate as somewhere under the shoddy gameplay is a decent game. But maybe cover shooters just aren't for me (though I rather enjoyed ME2s combat, so maybe it's not that after all)

Then they (the project promoters) need to start disclosing it, and how much. With a 600k minimum, I'm not sure what to think. KS supporters are starting to hold projects at greater levels scrutiny than ever before. They don't. Divinity: OS had external funding. Broken Age and Wasteland 2 had funding exceeding their KS earnings, which they filled in mostly through sales of their own backlogs. I can't remember if there's clear details about POE and Shadowrun. Otherside have said that they have external funding, which puts them in the same camp as those other projects. I haven't read the 200k comment marelooke mentions, so I can't be sure, but I suspect that's not all of it. Took me a bit to find the quote again, turns out it was in the anti-anti-crowdfunding article on http://www.underworldascendant.com/the-game/dev-updates.php (doesn't look like I can link directly to the exact post, it's titled "Time to Trash Talk Kickstarted Games?") The exact paragraph went like this: Yeah, the KS has been rather shoddily managed, I suggest they contact Larian and ask those guys how it's done. Since Swen is a pretty overt Ultima fanboy I'm pretty sure he'd be happy to help

Wasn't the end boss of Cataclysm Deathwing? But yeah, multiplayer can have some memorable moments. One of the funniest was when we did our first split group (2x10man group, because not enough lvl80s for a 25man raid) raid in Wrath of the Lich King and we had a bear of a time with the first boss in Naxxramas (the beetle, don't remember his name), to the point where someone looked up tactics, which didn't match with what we were seeing...at all (damage on tanks was insane, more adds were spawning than tactics said, it was a pretty big *wtf*). Turned out we were 10manning 25man Naxxramas in Black Temple/Sunwell gear, since we forgot about the, then new, 10/25man raid toggle, ouch...) Unfortunately the LFG system, the raid finder and all the other cross-realm features hollowed out the sense of commitment between guildies as well as the sense of community on a realm.

3D RPGs have been made for far less, it all depends on what expectations you have (Consortium gathered a bit over $70k, for example) Ah, but that's where I think their savings might come from, most RPGs are a lot of work because one has to script a huge amount of possibilities (and then test them all...). If they manage to make their improvisation engine do what they're envisioning most of that scripting work would disappear I'd think. Then they (the project promoters) need to start disclosing it, and how much. With a 600k minimum, I'm not sure what to think. KS supporters are starting to hold projects at greater levels scrutiny than ever before. They have said they are keeping $200k of the studio's funds aside as a contingency measure in case their estimates are off (or there are unexpected setbacks). Not sure if there is any other funding. (though 1/3 of their estimated budget is a rather nice buffer, imho)

I used to play MMOs rather intensively, besides the fact that I just don't have the insane amount of time to spend that I used to back then there's also the fact that the communities seem to have changed quite a lot, and for the worse imho. People are a lot more competitive, a lot less helpful and a lot more rude than they used to be. As for co-op, I just don 't have anybody to play with: playing with strangers doesn't appeal to me and most of my irl friends also have little time for gaming, trying to get our schedules to align on top of having limited time just doesn't appear to work. So the last years I've basically been playing solo (or with PUGs, in the few MMOs I still "play")

Looks like the first stretch goal will be achieved, would be really nice if the 700k goal is also met. I ended up upping my pledge by more than I probably should have, but I'm curious as to what they can achieve and the responses in the Codex interview kinda helped alleviate some of my doubts.

I tried playing it once, the lack of subtitles in the intro is a pretty big bummer as I, for some reason, had trouble following the dialogue.

Okay but realistically who doesn't use Microsoft as the the foundation of there IT infrastructure ? How many companies do you know of that don't have a Microsoft desktop OS and use Active Directory? And I am talking about SME's here and not your 10 -100 user companies ? Ehm, most companies don't use Microsoft as the foundation of their (business critical) IT infrastructure for various reasons (going into those would, I'm afraid, take us waaaay off topic), those are often *nix machines or mainframes (usually a combination of both). Among our developers more and more are switching away from Windows (even though Linux is officially an unsupported OS, but running it is tolerated and even encouraged by the operations people...) Active Directory is just a proprietary LDAP implementation with some bells and whistles and afaik can be presented to UNIX systems as one (and vice versa, it's not all that uncommon for the "Active Directory" in a company to be a Samba server backed by LDAP). I've also never seen the appeal of Exchange, it's too closely tied to Outlook (which as an email application ought to be taken out back and shot and the remains incinerated) though I have to admit the calendaring component is rather nice and as I've understood rather harder to replace by other solutions, unfortunately. But even if you want to (or "need" to) use Exchange (which has IMAP support, so you can use Exchange and still be free of Outlook) why would that suddenly mean you need to Microsoftize your entire infrastructure? I never understood why it has to be "or-or", there's no reason why one cannot run Exchange without AD, or have Exchange and AD for desktop use while leaving people free to use whatever they want on their own laptop/workstation, with the advent of smartphones it's become nigh impossible to entirely lock people into a single vendor ecosystem anyway. Not to mention that the number of Mac users tends to go up and quite often among the higher ups in corporations resulting in a more heterogeneous working environment anyway (company policy or no, you ain't gonna tell your boss to get rid of his Mac...or iPhone...), so slowly I'm seeing the MS-only shops disappear in favour of a more "whatever makes you get your work done"-attitude, which, in my book, is a lot more healthy anyway. "No really, you have to use the hand-saw using a chainsaw is against company policy..." Sure there are still companies clinging to total control of their IT infrastructure to the detriment of their employees, but hey, that's their problem. They'll get to catch up with the times eventually, or become obsolete.

Aha, now there's a reason for me to up my pledge above the minimum (I have a rule for myself that I never pledge more than the minimum to get the goods for any game that doens't provide a version for an open platform, so basically Linux as I don't expect game companies to start caring about the BSDs anytime soon ) Time to work through the updates to see if they said anything yet to alleviate the technical concerns I had concerning the feasibility of what they want to do with the budget they have. I have never understood why people really choose Linux over Windows, my basic argument being " why change something that is interoperable and works " But I respect your decision to base your KS funding on support for multi-platforms Well that depends on what you use it for, as a software developer I've never seen the appeal of using Windows, the platform is just terrible for any development that isn't tied to the Microsoft ecosystem (I've done some of the latter as well and I'd argue that even then it's not great). So the only real reason I have to keep Windows around is to play games, it would be great if I wouldn't even need it for that anymore.

Aha, now there's a reason for me to up my pledge above the minimum (I have a rule for myself that I never pledge more than the minimum to get the goods for any game that doens't provide a version for an open platform, so basically Linux as I don't expect game companies to start caring about the BSDs anytime soon ) Time to work through the updates to see if they said anything yet to alleviate the technical concerns I had concerning the feasibility of what they want to do with the budget they have.