marelooke

Phew, I thought you were talking about the *real* new Dungeon Keeper game for a while, not that pathetic offshoot. Glad I'm wrong and the review is about the pathetic offshoot. (yeah yeah, technically it's probably the other way around, gameplay wise that's how it is though) I am, of course, referring to War of the Overworld which aims to replicate the Dungeon Keeper (mostly 1, with the non-sucky bits of 2 added) gameplay. They lost the rights to the Dungeon Keeper franchise due to that pathetic excuse of a game above or this would have been Dungeon Keeper 3. Oh yes, website's here. Game is in Early Access on Steam currently and it's starting to shape up. Still seriously alpha though but it's stable and it actually feels like Dungeon Keeper (though the voice acting is sort of "meh" imho, hopefully that's just temporary) Wasn't able to participate in the previous one I was invited to, seems like they don't do second chances Keep use posted, I'm curious how this one will turn out (though, since it's a MMO, my expectations are rather low ) If you already gotten invites, aren't they still valid. Only people who didn't get invited previously got new ones this time around I think. The mail I got says my account and characters are still there. Not that I'll be able to participate this time due to being out of town, but still. Just got an e-mail, seems the previous invite is indeed still valid. Nice! Bethesda is imho good at making worlds that are fun to explore, if they at least carried that bit over to TESO it might be worth picking up. Hopefully I'll have some time this weekend to take a peek.

Wasn't able to participate in the previous one I was invited to, seems like they don't do second chances Keep use posted, I'm curious how this one will turn out (though, since it's a MMO, my expectations are rather low )

Wasn't this how it worked in the first Witcher? While not as epicly slow as mkreku's description of Gothic it was still something that left you vulnerable for the time it took Geralt to drink the potion. As for shattering the vials, I always considered them to be some sort of metal/steel containers rather than plain glass, otherwise the way he wears them on him would probably result in no potions after a battle, whether he used them or not... ;-)

True that. They generally provide plenty of hours for their price, especially compared to the stuff many of their competitors dare charge you for. Otoh one could hold them responsible for introducing that idea as well *cough* horse armor *cough* I've picked up Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning during the sale this weekend. I remembered not being particularly impressed by the demo. I also remembered people saying the demo was kinda bad compared to the full game. I'm level 11 or so now (arrived in Didenhill), game's not too bad, though so far I'd only give it like a 6/10 or so. Pretty average on all counts. It often feels just like an offline MMO, in the way the quests are delivered and how they play out, how combat works and how the world "feels".

Most Skyrim quests are pretty bland. The one you talk about here (part of the last DLC iirc) is easily one of the best, if not the best, quest in the game. It's also the only quest I remember where I actually gave a damn about any of the NPCs (RIP Katria). Now don't get me wrong, I greatly enjoyed Skyrim and put many many hours into the game and while I'll disagree that the writing was bad per se I wouldn't call most of the writing "engaging", at least not in a way that "sticks" (if that makes any sense) Though the fact that their character writing (Serana was pretty good for a Bethesda character as well) was becoming better near the end does give me hope for the next Elder Scrolls game.

Haven't been following this one closely (I consider TW2 a pretty big letdown still, mechanics wise) but so far I haven't seen anything about movement and/or combat, has that been talked about in any detail at all yet? (if so, any pointers?)

Aye, the D:OS alpha is very alpha for how close to their release they already were. But with Larian feature creep is a given so yeah, no surprise here either. As for the Styx game, will it have similar draconian DRM (limited activations) to "Of Orcs and Men" (reason I didn't touch that game on release, since removed though from what I heard) or am I allowed to get excited?

Except that, to a degree, in an MMO you have to afford the ability to solo because there will not always be somebody to play with you at all times. Multiplayer content can be the focus of your game, but you have to design a majority of your content (mostly of the leveling persuasion) around only one player being around at any time. This is why most MMO's are endgame focused... because endgame is the only time you can guarantee there will be a large segment of your population twittling their thumbs. Although City of Heroes added layer after layer of things to the midgame and was built around alts. Out of all the MMO's I've played EverQuest 2 (EQ2) kept me interested the longest (aside from WoW, which was my first and as such has a bit of a special case). The reason I quit playing that game had less to do with the game content than with the utter lack of attention the developer (SOE) had for the game and the constant taking away of features to make the game more easily accessible to new players (read it became more and more of a WoW-clone) I really liked EQ2's ability to "downscale" high level characters (forgot the actual name for it), it worked reasonably well too (except for the fact that it didn't account for out-of-date content, iow high level gear had certain stats that simply didn't exist in the early areas), the real great thing about it was that it actually benefits both the low and the high level characters so it happened very often that when a "lowbie" couldn't find a group there would almost always be a bunch of high level characters ready to jump in to help. The fact that there was just a huge world to explore also helped, it wasn't until the last few expansions that there were multiple areas to go quest in, there were even just "adventure packs", which contained more same-level content with only cosmetic rewards but that had fun storylines. It is entirely feasible (and likely) to hit max level in EQ2 and not have seen more than half of the "world map" and up until the end I kept discovering new quests, dungeons etc, some of which even "ancients" (just made this up, but I mean players that had been playing since the beginning) had forgotten about. You could, and I often did, alone or in group, just go out to an area and see the sights. Sure raiding with people is fun, PvP (world or otherwise) can be great fun if you're into it. But there needs to be more to the world than being guided from area to area doing the same old quests following a singular storyline ending with getting a group to fight some bosses, same as everyone else. There needs to be stuff to discover and the discovery ought to be a reward in itself, not the subject of random achievements ("find all the hidden stone tablets with bull**** written on them"). I remember grinding reputation with factions just to acquire some cool looking (in *my* mind anyway) garb for my character and most of those factions weren't exactly the "endgame" factions. I recall trudging all over entire continents just to acquire a certain title, not because that title signified some awesome boss kill or some exclusive "achievement", but because that title was awesome in itself and *fit my character*. Or even to get some furniture for my house. This generally sounds silly to the "modern" MMO-crowd, I mean, why put effort into stuff that doesn't give you XP or 1337 gear. Right? Yeah, I didn't think so either. I guess the TL;DR, MMORPGs need to become RPGs once more. Maybe then I'll find one I can care about once more.

Restarted in X-COM after reading a bit about managing panic levels and doing much better now on the $$$ front. Quite enjoying the game though the incredible randomness of combat can be rather annoying. Then again, haven't really encountered any "hard" enemies yet afaik (the Hulk guys are the biggest baddies I've seen so far) Probably going to dabble in Divinity: Original Sin's alpha some more later as well (already made it past character creation (such as there currently is), which is further than a bunch of guys got. Also: "It's gonna be awesome!"

I laughed way more at this than I should have. Mainly because it's not that far from the reality of a lot of the dialogue. Now combine this with a voiced protagonist for Fallout Effect 4. I'm sure someone can work a dialog wheel into that! ;-)

If they'd announced they were going turn-based on the KS page they wouldn't have received anywhere near the amount of $$$ they did. While what they did was "valid" in respect to what they said (or didn't say) they would do I consider it rather "tasteless". Combat is only mentioned twice on the KS page and there certainly is no mention of either TB or RTwP or any other system. Based on the textual information on the KS page it was perfectly reasonable to expect Numenera to have a similar combat system as PS:T, but with the kinks worked out. Instead it gets a radically different one. Whether it will be an improvement will remain to be seen but I'm very sure they lost quite a lot of fans/future backers with this farce.

Personally I prefer the dwarf from Dragon Age 2 for that role.

The only mod I used was the one that placed a missing part of the Elven Chain-mail where it should be able to be found, though I don't remember which part it was but afaik it was never fixed by BioWare, so without the mod that set is impossible to complete.

I know of only one way. To me that did not seem like an obvious path to get there. Well, it's broadcasted all over Skyrim... (spoilers about accessing the Dark Brotherhood questchain below) A lot of them got fixed, but it's still a good idea to grab the unofficial patches though as suggested above by WDeranged, quite a lot of bugs only show up later even though they are *caused* early on, and by the time you run into them it's too late to fix them. (for example there are many unfixed bugs related to the randomly generated generic sidequests clashing with major questchains or DLC quests, which obviously only show once you get to that point). And afaik the achievement to acquire all Daedric artifacts still breaks very often, depending on the order in which you acquire them (it's one of two I don't have for Skyrim, even though I should have received this particular one). Of course, assuming you care about these things. You might want to look into ENBSeries and other graphical mods, the Skyrim defaults even with maxed out settings and high-res pack really don't bring out full the potential of the game. (I also really liked the aMidianBorn retextures of various things in Skyrim, mostly armors and weapons but he's worked on other things as well) Difficulty is fairly brutal early on, but once you get some essential skills under your belt for your chosen playstyle it gets much easier very quickly.

Easy to miss the Dark Brotherhood questchain? The only way it could've been made more obvious is if they stopped you and handed you a flyer... How obvious it is to find and join all the secret-y organizations is one of the things I found rather irritating in Skyrim. It seemed a lot harder to pull of in Oblivion at least... Personally started playing XCOM Enemy Unknown for the first time now (without the expansion). Looking like good fun so far. Oh, and I also don't own Dark Souls. Game doesn't quite appeal to me (hack-and-slashy lootfest that's hard for the sake of being hard; at least that's what I gathered from what I read about it anyway), it apparently being a terrible console port that needs lots of fixing to be playable doesn't exactly help convince me it's worth my time, let alone my money.

This time I will have to agree. I'm also quite torn on the subject they brought up, so the weak attempt at humour didn't really do much for me.

I rather take a game that I enjoy for the full 15 hours it offers than a game that takes 80 hours to finish of which I only enjoy the first 40 hours before it starts to get boring. Everything can and will turn into **** if it just keeps on going and going, no matter how much you like it. I think that I would take 40 hours enjoyment over 15 hours even if it means that I don't finish the game. But I understand that some people don't like leave their games unfinished, in which case I also would pick 15 hours enjoyment option instead of 40 hours of dullness. Personally I'd say a good game is never too long. If it is it's just not a good game. (it might be "decent", but "good"? Nope). I might call the first half (or x percent) of the game good (or great), but I'd never call the entire game "good" (case in point: KotOR2)

I probably should have specified that said person considered the game he was playing to be a good game. Also I didn't really consider DA:O to be too long...on my first playthrough, then the lack of sidequests and the railroaded "Go find allies." got rather annoying (not quite as annoying as the snorefest that was NWN1's OC though, nor quite as retarded as having to go catch some escaped critters)

Wait, you're surprised about this? This is the direction that gaming is headed and has been for years. I estimate we're only a year or two away from games coming out with a special edition you can buy for a cool $20 more where you don't get the game at all, but instead you automatically are awarded all the achievements so that you can show off your SKILLZ and your ePen1s can grow. As sad as that sounds it wouldn't really surprise me... I once heard someone slamming a game because it was "too long", so it took him "too long" to finish so he could move on to the next game... I died a little that day.

It's probably just because we have so many games that have a lower case o in the acronym, so it looks more natural. WoW, PoP, CoD, etc. It's not really something I notice much. Yups, that's why. It should indeed be GOG of course. (though I do like recursive acronyms)

Drat, and here I was thinking they killed off the Origin service, that would have been great news, alas...

I wasn't even on Kickstarter when P:E was announced so I missed the KS campaign, I did back via PayPal though. I generally tend to turn off any party AI other than the most basic, *especially* for casters. Personally I voted RTwP for three reasons: 1) I've had heaps of fun with the combat in many RTwP games (BG series, comes to mind, but also, IWD and DA:O) 2) PS:T was RTwP. PS:T also had an atrocious UI (which for me killed much of the enjoyment of the game, and not just the combat) 3) There are a quite a few turn based RPGs coming up (Wasteland 2, Divinity: Original Sin, Deathfire: Ruins of Nevermore), not so much RTwP (only P:E afaik) 4) So far I've enjoyed RTwP more than pure TB, though my experience with the latter is more limited (HOMM & Shadowrun Returns mostly, though judging by the WL2 footage it looks similar to SRR's). EDIT: typo's

And most of us have been blissfully ignoring that fact and will continue to do so. Because acronyms are just better and GoG is just fancier than Gog...

You'd think they would have learned something from The Witcher 2... Shame the release is so shoddy, the easier-to-get-started aspect really interested me as while I loved the idea of X3 (I rather enjoyed EVE) I found getting into it just too time consuming.