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marelooke

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Posts posted by marelooke

  1. Not in a cavern, but you do get your choice, or all, to build on the coast, or way up in the mountains, or lakeside. Cold, northwestern beachfront property ... or central mountains, with even more snow ... breezy lakeview atop a cliff ... and one other I'm forgetting.

    Actually it's "and". You can build on all locations if you have the gold and materials to do so (and match the requirements for the Thane to be willing to sell you the land).

  2. As I understood most people's objections are to them touching and adding content to the original games (iirc the cutscene graphics are replaced with new ones and they've added some new companions). I haven't personally tried it though and since I already owned the Gog version I didn't see any need to get the EE.

     

    EDIT: see post below

  3. I'll just quote myself on that topic (something that was conveniently ignored by many, I know, reading the rest before replying would've left far less room for wisecracking):

     

    Anyway I'm quite willing to accept it might just be personal preference in play here. Iow that I'm assuming she's acting it while she maybe actually does sound like that (in which case I think she has a horrible accent, but hey, de gustibus et coloribus ...).

     

    I don't recall being annoyed by the voice acting the The Saboteur so it must be something she does that ticks me off in which case I hope they get a better male voice actor for Zorro ;)

    As for the rest of that thread:

     

    Amazing, you've managed to prove scientifically that there is only a single "correct" French accent for spoken English. A French actress speaking English in a game world where French doesn't even exist so it's actually irrelevant is simply faking it, obviously. You should have a PhD in linguistics for this remarkable discovery.

    You're pulling things so far out of context I nearly didn't deign it worthy a reply. Me posting a clip of someone actually speaking English in a natural environment in no way constitutes a statement that that is "the one true accent". Even stating so is insulting my and your own intelligence.

     

    Yes, because

    A) all francophones have the same accent in English (and French!)

    B) Leliana isn't actually from a fantasy country called Orlais but Brussels and your criticism is entirelyvalid! :p

    For a) see my response to AGX-17, for b: get a map and locate Brussels, then figure out where France is, then wonder how often I might conceivably have to deal with "real" French speaking English (on top of the Walloons, of course). Of course, the French probably aren't a good reference when it comes to French accents, I'm sorry, I have little experience with the Quebequois. If you qre however saying they weren't going for a French vibe then I'm afraid they failed because everything about Orlais screams "fantasyland France", so in that case I'd have expected a more representative accent.

     

    So to make it clear to AGX-17 and Nepenthe I'll spell it out explicitly: It is my personal opinion that Leliana has an annoying accent, she also doesn't sound like any French person speaking English I've ever met (and I've met more than a few living where I live) and as such I do hope that they'll get a voice actor with a more representative (and especially, less annoying) accent for Zorro (sorry, keep forgetting his name).

  4.  

     

     

     

    I sure hope his fake French accent will be better than Leliana's.

     

    Thanks for repeating the best criticism of DAO! (The voice actress doing Leliana is a native French speaker!)

     

     

    So it's official: true French accent is even more jarring than the fake! :p

     

    Or a true French overacting a French accent for a game. I'm pretty sure she has a decent accent when speaking normally.

     

    Here's a French woman (former French first lady Carla Bruni) speaking English (skip to the 4 minute mark) without trying to "sound French": *snip*

     

     

    Well, it doesn't sound nearly half as bad as my thick eastern-european accent, so I guess I've got no right to complain about the French  *shrug* :)

     

    Oh, I have a pretty bad Flemish accent in English (too bad I'm not a girl, my sister has repeatedly been told by Americans that it's "cute" ;)), it's better in French although I likely butcher the grammar like there's no tomorrow :p

     

    Anyway I'm quite willing to accept it might just be personal preference in play here. Iow that I'm assuming she's acting it while she maybe actually does sound like that (in which case I think she has a horrible accent, but hey, de gustibus et coloribus ...).

     

    I don't recall being annoyed by the voice acting the The Saboteur so it must be something she does that ticks me off in which case I hope they get a better male voice actor for Zorro ;)

  5.  

     

    I sure hope his fake French accent will be better than Leliana's.

     

    Thanks for repeating the best criticism of DAO! (The voice actress doing Leliana is a native French speaker!)

     

     

    So it's official: true French accent is even more jarring than the fake! :p

     

    Or a true French overacting a French accent for a game. I'm pretty sure she has a decent accent when speaking normally.

     

    Here's a French woman (former French first lady Carla Bruni) speaking English (skip to the 4 minute mark) without trying to "sound French": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrL_lFabbQw

     

    I'll admit it likely is not quite as dreamy sounding for foreigners as Leliana's acted French accent.

  6.  

    I sure hope his fake French accent will be better than Leliana's.

     

    Thanks for repeating the best criticism of DAO! (The voice actress doing Leliana is a native French speaker!)

     

    In that case she's doing a very good job of overacting. Note that I live and work in Brussels, I have to listen to native French-speakers speaking English all day.

     

    Though, on second thought, the over-the-top lisp she adds might be the thing that actually sets me off (because I hear it a lot on wannabe French-sounding actresses)

  7. I looked at some gameplay footage of Original Sin and I gotta say 2d isometric looks so much better. This looks more like, i dunno, Torchlight.

    I think that's mostly due to the colour scheme used. I probably would have preferred a darker setting (which would instantly have made it look more like 2D isometric game I guess. That said, creating simple tooling for a 2D isometric RPG seems rather hard, especially given the amount of reactivity the world has.

     

    Character creation looked pretty awful.

    It's decent in the latest build, though the UI certainly could be simplified (I'm still missing a "custom" option instead of having to start from some preset, for example).

    But UI design in general doesn't seem Larian's strong point (then again, it doesn't seem to be a strong point of many [game] developers. On top of that it appears it is generally treated as an afterthought as well.). That said, the UI is better than I feared given the earlier betas and seems certainly usable.

  8. Metro: Last Light and Divinity: Original Sin on and off courtesy of GabeN. Actually really impressed with LL, not so much with Divinity (if I wanted to talk to myself with poorly written lines and rock, paper, scissors I could drink excessive amounts of alcohol and do it on my own. Even with a second player, the lines don't stop being garbage as far as writing goes.)

    Not a fan of the rock, paper. scissors mini-game either and an option to disable it and just roll the dice (as it used to be earlier in beta) was requested by a bunch of people (including yours truly). The dialogues very early in are a tad cheesy I'll admit, it usually does get better later in the game though if their earlier games are anything to go by. Of course if Larian's sense of humour doesn't appeal to you you're out of luck I guess.

  9. I'm always sad when wolves are used as enemies :( Poor wolves are in reality quite shy and extremely unlikely to attack humans... I know it's a fantasy world but there's already such an insane amount irrational fear surrounding the beasties (at least in these parts, where wolves are extinct and might finally slowly start reappearing in the coming years)...

    • Like 4
  10.  

    You are feeding my tin foil thoughts, Sensuki. I like it.

    I don't think it is tin foil at all.  Art of language my friend, if he meant "we have eight companions" he wouldn't have said "announced" at the end of it.  He would have just left it at that.  I wouldn't be shocked if somehow all classes get covered.  After all that is something any backer who has spoken on it pretty much universally wanted.

     

    On a sort of related topic, has something been mentioned about how companions will be interacting with each other, more specifically, will some *hate* each other to the point of it being a really really bad idea to have them together in your party (think Viconia and Keldorn)? Because if so 8 companions might end up a bit tight if you can have 5 of them in your party at one time.

  11.  

    Looks like some former S.T.A.L.K.E.R. devs are about to launch a Kickstarter for a game called Areal.  Their official site doesn't have much info yet, apart from some concept art.

     

    As someone who holds the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games in the highest of regards, I'll obviously be following this closely.

    Don't Trust Areal.

     

    Seems the Vostok forum thread has been deleted. Either way even ignoring those claims, their budget and team is way too small to create a decent S.T.A.L.K.E.R. successor so I'm just going to sit back and watch how this will play out.

     

    EDIT: also found link but all the source links are dead too. Smells fishy to say the least.

  12. Still playing Remember Me, made it to Act IV and beat the boss there.

     

    The combat is kind of getting on my nerves. Besides my inability to reliably hit some combos (the timing seems really finicky sometimes. But I'm not great at these kind of games so I'm quite willing to accept the problem is me, or maybe I'm having input lag due to my laptop not being actually powerful enough, even though the game otherwise appears to run rather smoothly) and the camera doesn't make it any easier. The most frustrating fight so far was the (big) group of these invisible stalkers backed up with regular friends at the start of Act IV, most of the time I couldn't see anything due to the camera angles. Most other fights otoh, are easy (I'm playing on easy after all ;) )

     

    Then the bossfights, the Act IV boss was an exercise in frustration, not because the boss was hard mind you (because it wasn't), but because the fight took me well over 30minutes to complete (and that is a conservative estimate as I didn't actually measure it, note that I didn't die once, so this was *one* battle). Add on top of that the fact that to "finish" boss fights you get to do a bunch of QTEs (which I suck at) and the frustration was complete as I had to restart that QTE thing like 5 times before I had memorized all the different keys (luckily they weren't random). "skilled" people can probably do this fight faster, but seriously, if I were "skilled" I wouldn't be playing on easy.

     

    Other than that I'm enjoying the story and environments and I do intend to finish the game, but it appears it will be *despite* the combat mechanics.

     

    Semi-related things I've realized:

    * controllers hurt my hands if I have to use them a lot for things I generally use the mouse for (eg. looking and moving around), I never had this problem with racegames (which alongside platformers are the only game types I generally use them for) but I apparently can't play first/third person games for extended periods of time (= more than an hour) without my hands starting to hurt.

    * QTEs need to die and whoever invented them needs to be sent to the lowest circle of hell, and then down a few more floors. QTEs assume people know what buttons are under their fingers, I never actively do, not on a keyboard (unless my hands are in typing position, which they generally won't be when gaming) and not on a controller (where I just assign each "move" a "finger movement" in my brain), figuring out which action I need to take on a QTE takes me generally too long resulting in regular reloads. Just drop the damn QTEs and let me enjoy the cutscene, ugh.

    • Like 1
  13. Is this the "final" chapter of the sexy-but-not-too-grimdark  DA-series? or is romancable Bioware hoping it to be a love-interest neverending series like emotionally-engaging Final Fantasy?

     

     

    *Tried remove the Bioware-speak filter, but the words just seemed to come back no matter what

    It's probably the final chapter, just like there originally were only going to be three Mass Effect games (but hey, if there's money to be had... I don't really blame them for milking their franchises btw, it makes perfect business sense).

  14. Waiting for a sale on M&M X and wondering if Aarklash will go under -60% (on sale on Gog right now though, so might just grab it there...)

     

    I also noticed Blackguards is one sale right but the supposedly insane difficulty is kinda putting me off.

  15. I'm playing Skyrim for the first time in about 2 years.  Luckily, Skyrim runs on Linux via wine pretty much every bit as well as on its native Windows right down to performance being on par, so I can push the game to maximum settings and I can add graphical enhancement mods.  I've been messing around with different mods and am currently using Skyrim 2K HD (higher res textures than the official high res textures), Ultimate Lighting Overhaul (SweetFX settings, more subtle than ENB replacers and far less performance hit), Pure Waters, Pure Weather (as a bonus, makes nights much darker), Splash of Rain, Apachii Sky Hair, Quality World Map, Auto Unequip Ammo (this should have been the default behavior in the vanilla game, why leave the quiver on the back when you don't have a bow equipped?), Caliente Better Bodies Mod with nevernude option (I want bodies to look better, but I don't want a bunch of naked women lying around after I strip corpses of their armor).

     

    Anyone got any suggestions?

    I made a list of my favourite mods as reply to a Steam forum post quite a while ago, I still stand by that list (thought it might expand if I were to revisit the Nexus now): http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=33915926&postcount=2

     

    Especially the aMidianBorn retextures are pretty damn awesome (and they're just that, retextures, no changing stats or anything).

    • Like 1
  16.  

    There are some small snippets of the Tactical Camera/Pause and Play system in various E3 videos. It likely won't look too different on the different platforms, but yes it will be available on all platforms. The only place I might see differences is in how high/low the camera can go on older consoles, although this would be scene specific (i.e. would happen on places that are a perfect storm of potential performance issues) and while paused performance thresholds can be higher so it may not be an issue.

     

    The system involves the usual "give orders" though it doesn't have a queue (wanted it, but opted to focus on getting the base implementation working. Could be expanded on in future games), although your character will move to targets for melee abilities. It differs from DA2 in that you can use an "engage" mode which has the time move forward, but keeps the camera detached from any particular party member. It has pretty decent range, though is tethered to the party (for level streaming reasons).

    From the sound of it they're just going with a console interface that should be "good enough" for PC users. What the video showed didn't look very great, from a kb/mouse user's point of view anyway.

     

    I'm hoping the radial menu can be skipped favor of shortcuts at least (then again, they couldn't even be bothered in the latest 2 Mass Effects, so I'm not going to get my hopes up)

  17. Finished Demonicon and I ended up enjoying it. It's got a fairly interesting main story even though it's rather shoddily told (making the PC say and do dumb things because of *plot* is annoying, or at the very least could've been handled better) and an interesting setting (I wasn't really all that familiar with the world of The Dark Eye, which reminds me that I really ought to start playing Drakensang in earnest).

     

    C&C is limited to binary choices with limited consequences later on, however which is the "good" or the "bad" choice (or whether there is even a good or bad choice) isn't generally clear cut, which is something I rather liked.

     

    Combat is average and magic (aside from the frost bolt that freezes and the knock back ability) seemed rather lackluster.

     

     

    I've now started playing Remember Me, the combat system isn't something that 's usually my cup of tea so I'm playing it on easy. The camera seems a bit annoying so far and I generally end up using KB+mouse for world exploring and a controller for combat and climbing. The environments look great and the story started off rather interesting so I'm curious where this will go since the game got rather mixed reviews :)

    • Like 1
  18.  

    I think it depends. Sometimes it just uses the player's stats and other times it uses the whole party.

    The toon you "rolled" or the toon you are currently controlling? For example, I wouldn't want the mage I rolled as my main to face an Athletics check if I have a beefy barbarian who would (presumably) have a higher Athletics ability.

     

    I'm guessing that in some case everyone needs to pass the check, like when diving through the waterfall (assuming lack of equipment to get other characters across once one has passed). It wouldn't make much sense that because your rogue managed to leap over your mage suddenly gets a DEX boost and manages the same.

     

    But I don't see any reason why you'd need multiple check when, for example, moving a rock out of the way. If one character is strong enough to move the rock that ought to be good enough.

     

    Whether it's actually enjoyable as a gameplay mechanic is another matter though ;) (personally I'm rather optimistc that it'll turn out fine)

    • Like 1
  19. Dammit, I knew I couldn't hide my 3D modelling prodigy of an alt secret forever.

     

     

     

    EDIT: Oh, and turns out the extra was just the T-shirt addons I completely forgot about. So should be good now. I'd forgotten to do the Message in the Woods thing as well, they're still accepting the text entry but no idea if it's actually locked down yet.

    I just filled in the name-a-pet today, don't really have much inspiration for the other two I have access to (name an undead and the message in a bottle)

  20. Heh, I forgot that I made two separate pledges for the game on two Kickstarter accounts, totally forgot to register address details for the one with all the special goodies. Would've sucked not getting my pretty trinkets.

     

    EDIT: And now the backer interface shows I gave an extra $50 for add-ons which I don't remember at all. I can't be expected to remember things for two years!

    They refunded some money for people with alpha/beta access (since they ended up giving it to every backer), maybe it's that?

  21. Heh, weird that all that'd only add up to ten days I guess. I imagine I'll download the DRM-free version direct from the Larian Vault though, so not really concerned about alternate vendors.

     

    I guess the rationale becomes opposite here though. They're releasing a full priced title right into the midst of Steam sale hype. Not sure how that'd work.

    Well Larian has been providing their games DRM free for a long while, in that regard they're probably on the same page as the Gog guys, on top of that the lack of decent matchmaking on non-Steam platforms was a bit of an issue for Dragon Commander, so it doesn't seem inconceivable that they've been working with Gog on integrating their new multiplayer service for quite some time already. Which would possibly turn D:OS into a "launch title" for the Gog thing.

     

    Btw, I generally grab a Larian Vault key as well, if only for the fact that this has so far provided me with a DRM free copy *and* a Steam key (has been the case for the Divinity Anthology (currently 33% off on the Vault btw), which I got in a nice box as well as Dragon Commander).

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