majestic

I finally finished the game. Technical issues like the path finding and weird reponse times aside I think inXile tried too hard and ended up "Michael Bay'ing" the game. Where Michael Bay movies are essentially a string of scenes happening for the sake of showing off flashy explosions, great special effects and action shots with barely a coherent plot to connect them TTON is a string of dialogues happening for the sake of having lots of - admittedly well written and interesting - text in the game. So, so, so much of it is simply there to be there, not because it furthers the player's uncovering of what is happening. In PS:T, for all its faults and verbosity at times, you're uncovering what is going on, step by step. There is focus and coherence, especially during the first two thirds of the game. Sure there are sidequests that are completely unrelated and far too many of them are fed ex quests, but compare one of the core dialogue mechanic for both games: In PS:T, remembering tells you more of what is happening around you. It furthers your knowledge of past incarnations or helps to understand the connection TNO and his companions share. It is part of uncovering the mystery of what is happening. TTON, with a rather similar premise the same mechanic uncovers bits and pieces of your past, but almost none of that has anything to do with uncovering what is going on. A missable side quest has more connection to the plot than remembering... anything. In PS:T I ended up talking to everything and everyone because I wanted to know more. I did the same in TTON hoping it do the same but for the most part it just didn't. There are 1.2 million words of set up in TTON and preciously little payoff. All things aside, I still enjoyed the game and reading the epilogue text about the companions sometimes put a smile on my face or made me sad, and that speaks to the written word's strength in the game, because the companions are a bit underdeveloped.

Oh nice, hello Immortal Edition upgrade.

Bonus points: Get Feargus Urquhart right. Both the spelling and the pronunciation.

No Man's Sky never looked bad or boring in their videos. The final product was both. Regardless, I'd say those exo-vehicles are a step in the right direction, assuming its not a total pain to get them. Not that they would have been necessary if we could just, well, fly below the enforced minimum altitude like shown in past trailers. *cough*

Rule of thumb: If you can read the parameters in the URL it's GET.

Great, seeing Timo Tolkki in that video is sure as hell going to make me wander down the nostalgia lane tonight. Even had to look twice considering he looks a bit like Meat Loaf these days.

Considering that sandboxy open world garbage is all the rage right now I find that highly... unlikely. It's just the way the big publishers are making their games these days. Analyze what sold well in the past years, create lists of buzz words describing these really successful (in terms of sales) games, pick the 10 highest matches, look which one of your studios fits the description most and have them produce a game with some hefty corporate interference. And it is only going to become worse with the proliferation of fast and easy "big data" analysis tools.

Really? If anything that makes me save scum even more because I need to get through every check with two different outcomes to see when exactly failure is the better option, at least when it comes to items and, ridiculously enough, stat increases. Succeeding gives you 50 shins and failing a permanent +1 to Quick Fingers? Riiiight. No, not gonna scum that. No way.

They actually do. It just doesn't work most of the time because not enough players are in the queue and the matchmaker eventually gives up and starts the game. It worked (at least on my server, which was Vanjervalis Chain) back when GSF first launched and for a week after the introduction of the galactic conquest event with the special GSF objectives. It still is an 3D arcade third person shooter in a game where the average player is a headless chicken unable to navigate a 2D space so they don't stand in the fire. To be honest I'm surprised GSF works as well as it does. It also probably is the most balanced part of the game, mostly because there hasn't been any fiddling with it in three years or so.

Maybe it depends on the save. I had a save from around half year ago and had this bug. It depends on how old the savegame is apparently. inXile has changed the way the screenshots in the loading screens are stored in between so really old savegames mess up the loading screen really good, newer ones from early access don't.

You should have seen the state of the game - and the UI - back in the alpha. Compared to the first playable versions the characters are positively responsive and the UI is wonderful. The first iteration had non-descript buttons with flat coloring and figuring out how to spend effort on a task took some, uhm, effort. To say the least.

Heh. The Codex is a low tier website. You got that part right. /scnr

Speaking of tech issues, if anyone has old beta/early access savegames lying around delete them first. The bug itself existed in the early access version as well, and it is still not fixed. Old savegames make loading new ones a chore, if not impossible. *sigh*

Throne of Bhaal was turned into an expansion some six years before EA bought Bioware, and if anything was to blame then it was the ongoing development of Neverwinter Nights and the financial yahoos at Interplay. After all, Baldur's Gate already, ahm, Foreshadowed (heh, feeling so clever now) its release and it still took four more years to complete. Well, maybe that wasn't such a bad thing after all. Imagine what Throne of Bhaal might have been like if the team that created the NWN original campaign would have had more time to fiddle with ToB.

In Dragonfall it's not missing out as much as having to fight much more often. A decent decker with some charisma can save you a lot of time and grief. Unless you're really into the combat system. Minor spoiler: If you create a Troll decker you'll still be able to pass (almost) every decking, intelligence and charisma check in the game if you save scum a bit, so they're generally really mild.

Rewatched Troll 2. Yep. 27 years later it's still awesome as hell.

He was a huge part of how I managed to get through the first season of Agents of SHIELD without dropping it. Glad I did. Really sorry to see him go.

Good ol' Luzi and his mad ravings that someone at Bioware designed Cassandra to look like a man on purpose just to spite him. I miss his gems of wisdom: LGBT/Feminists have made an attack against straight male gamers by purposely making Cassandra Pentaghast look like a man and making Josephine as ugly as possible, thus setting up straight male gamers to be called bigots & misogynists if they express a desire for more attractive women. He disappeared a while ago, probably together with Qis and Oby. I wonder...

There are two for me that stand out, the usual suspects aside. Dragonsphere's Ratsickle riddle. And Final Fantasy Adventure's Figure 8. I eventually solved it. It just took a while. In fact, I played so long that the rest of the game got extremely boring because I massively grinded levels and money by running through every freaking screen trying to figure out what to do.

Final "level" is a bit of an overstatement, you're thrown into a nigh unwinnable battle and unless you managed to score all the right equipment and are supremely lucky in the final fight it's game over in the first phase of three (even on "easy")... ...and the advanced edition made things even worse.

Yeah, I caught that after I posted. However the bullet point before the chart is clearly about "murder". I'm going to discard the idea that they confused the two, and assume it was just a crafty maneuver to mislead. How very sly. It certianly looks more impressive than a plot of the murder rate would have, so it is fairly safe to assume it was intentional.

Yeah, the chart looks like it's manipulated... or maybe it's just garbage. Not surprising. From '90 to '91 murder and nonnegligent manslaughter went up from 9.4 to 9.8 (per 100k pops). From 2014 to 2015, it went from 4.4 to 4.9. It seems Trump can't tell the difference between local and global extrema, and Maher doesn't know what he's talking about when he proclaims the change to be an "aberration or blip". Something something inflection points something something slopes I did watch the video. btw. Hilarious how that idiot claims that hysteria "is working". Morgan's guess about 2016 seems to be right on the money judging from the preliminary data release, but it's obviously an argumentum ex culo, with a 50% chance of being right. Sources: https://ucrdatatool.gov/Search/Crime/State/RunCrimeStatebyState.cfm https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/table-1 https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/preliminary-semiannual-uniform-crime-report-januaryjune-2016/tables/table-3 The chart in the video is violent crime, not murder and nonnegligent manslaughter. The numbers from the table (second link) seem to roughly match up with the chart, as far as they go. Depends on what they were talking about anyway, but yes, neither Maher nor Morgan have any idea what they're talking about with regards to that chart. The hysteria stuff was fun. I laughed. I though that was the point of these shows. Heh.

Age of Decadence, because it's mostly a "love or hate it" deal that is either going to suck you in and make you play it for a while or you'll just drop it like a hot potato. The other two are major timesinks assuming you like sci-fi ship controlling roguelikes and city builders, of course.

Heh. I managed to put several hours into the game when it was just an alpha with only the character generation available to play through. Most of the time I spent doing the different tide text adventures at the very beginning when they became available. The update to Windows 10 stopped me from playing the beta any further, because back then Torment's performance under Windows 10 was abysmal, then decided to wait for the final version instead of risking to burn myself out on the beta. Because that's exactly what happened to be while playing Everspace. ^^

"The highest spike in crime rate since '71" Morgan says. Now I'm a bit myopic but based on the statistics from Maher's chart the spike from '91 was much, much higher than the one from 2015. Probably a manipulated chart though. *shrug* Did you actually watch the full video, or at least the second showing of the chart? All the talking about the crime statistics in the video regarding to 2016 is conjecture. Hence Morgan saying that 2016 is likely to have seen a similar spike. The rest as discussed in this thread is overinterpretation and confirmation bias. Or maybe the use of alternative English. I've suspected for a while now that the English I was taught is not quite the same as the one spoken in the US and read here on this forum.