majestic

http://dulfy.net/2015/08/06/swtor-gamescom-cantina-tour-qa/#August_7_QA Heh. Chat bubbles, if they can solve the performance issue. That performance issue was the reason why they turned them off during closed beta half a decade ago... but hey, well, now that pigs can fly nothing is certain any more, right?

That is not very surprising. Belsavis is, amongst Taris and, eh, Corellia, the biggest character graveyard of mine. I loathe those planets with a passion. Although in the case of Taris that is mostly KOTOR's fault, and not SWTOR's. Also, you're probably better off with not finishing the Trooper story. While the ending isn't bad in the Mass Effect 3 sense it will probably make you pull out your hair. Heh.

That's true, but not because Obsidian or MCA didn't "quite get" the Sith, it's just that they/he used the game (and Kreia in particular) as mouthpiece for his critique on Star Wars' entire take on the black and white "good vs. evil" angle it has going - which of course is much better used in a typical Bioware storyline/setting.

I disagree - breaking Traya and leaving her powerless on her own is necessarily not sith-y enough. Arrogance is a trait exhibited by many Sith and all the more prevalent the more powerful they are. Not killing Kreia wasn't the most cunning course of action, but where ever have Nihlus or Sion exhibited any cunning at all? That's part of the reason why Kreia considers them as failures, aside from both being only able to live through - or because of - the force. Also the power-struggle between Nihlus and Sion is part of the cut KOTOR 2 content - a cutscene where Nihlus pretty handily shows Sion just how pathetic he really is.

I fetched myself Albion from GOG. Currently grinding levels, much needed cash and some gear. Took me a while to get over the antiquated gameplay mechanics (gold having weight, actually needing food, no context-sensitive left click, it's all so... archaic, somehow) but the game itself is pretty awesome. If a little unforgiving with the combat at first.

But wouldnt that money be recouped by people buying the game due to multiplayer? So basically it would pay for itself. The only factor implementing multiplayer would take up would be time. It'd take time away from improving single player by implementing multiplayer. Fiscally, adding multiplayer would only make sense if the market potential outweighs the financial risk of more post-mortem major feature adding, bugfixing, more patches and added testing overhead in a meaningful way by adding enough sales or if you plan to profit from microtransactions during multiplayer. I don't see either happening for PoE. The former simply because the target audience is too different and the latter would be akin to commiting PR-suicide.

A line of code here, new interface there... I'm sure it's something Josh could put together during his lunch break. Don't be silly, adding network functionality/multiplayer to a design never intended for it is so simple you can have an intern do it. Why bother JE with it at all? edit: To be a little more serious alexis13, no, adding multiplayer to PoE would not be trivial and most likely, given the target audience of the game, would not lead to enough new sales to justify the expenses and problems.

I enjoyed Cole quite a lot, it's too bad that he's an assassin. He has some pretty awesome interactions especially with Solas. He also is a walking spoiler, mostly in hindsight. Like his remark about Blackwall which pretty much reveals everything... and nothing if you don't know what he's talking about:

It's handwaved at some point by Solas. Generally... because magic.

It's even smaller than Lothering, when you factor in the stuff that you can do there (ie. quests associated with it). Kirkwall puts it to absolute shame, which is funny considering how much hate DA2 got. Unlike Val Royeaux or Denerim, Kirkwall was the centerpiece of Dragon Age 2. It's only logical to make the explorable portion relatively large. Skyhold would be a much better comparison, function wise (much like the Normandy in any Mass Effect for that matter) and Skyhold's explorable area is way above and beyond Val Royeaux's. Speaking of urban centers, Kirkwall is about as large as I like them to be. Anything bigger and you'll usually end up with Baldur's Gate, really large but devoid of any real substance.

That's why modern MMOs have the "solo to max level" approach with the real multiplayer stuff happening afterwards, with various ways to help them to get into progression smoothly, unless the game is completely focused on player versus player gameplay. Games like Everquest have just shown that it's not easy to catch up with the general population character level once the game has been running for a sufficiently long period of time - it turns from fun into a job after a while. It also creates an environment that is incredibly punishing for new players and games that ran long enough to notice the population disparity tried their best to fix them - EQ introduced mercenaries, EQ2 came with a mentoring system and eventually remade leveling into solo-able content. WoW's unparalleled success came from being casual from the get-go instead of a second job. I loved Everquest, but back then I was a student and I had all the time in the world to play. It didn't bother me that there weren't any auction houses and you had to stand around at the market waiting for other players to come buy from you (no, really, if you wanted to sell your crafted things you had to actually "play" booth). But Everquest is still running to go ahead and check it out. The base game is free I think. Maybe you can even find someone to play with you, because there is literally nothing you can do without a group (or mercenaries I guess, I quit before they appeared).

I wasted tens upon tens of millions of credits and thousands of cartel coinds on finishing collections back when I still played all the time. That's not weird, that just makes you part of the target audience for free-to-play games.

Yeah, part of Classic WOW & TBC's difficulty came from having to fight the game as well as the enemies, especially with regards to tanking and keeping aggro and having to have a certain setup to get through the fights, or fights being unreasonably hard with certain setups or specs being completely worthless. Maybe it was the sense of being new and all, but the WoW still was more "fun" back then - before I completely burned out on it during Firelands in Cataclysm where they gameplay was the reason for the game being hard, rather than the game & class mechanics. *shrug*

The dungeons that came out after 5.2 were tuned down back to WotLK difficulty levels, but I'm pretty certain that if you could actually take The Stonecore heroic and somehow paste it into TBC it would come out squarely on top in terms of 5-man difficulty. Compared to that instances like the Shadow Labyrinth heroic seemed to be downright, uhm, reasonable.

Derek Smart has always been a nutjob and that will most likely never change, but I'm also quite afraid that Star Citizen will turn out to be heavily molyneuxed when it is released. I wish Chris Roberts all the best for the many, many hours of awesome entertainment he's given me and that everythink works out just the way he wants it to, but the pessimist in me somehow doubts that. Hope I'm wrong.

I wonder if that's retroactive, but somehow I don't think Kalyio would mind that much.

That is a simple issue of realpolitik - everything else would be worse from our perspective. This is particularily true for Syria's regime who more or less is beset by rebels of various factions and almost all of them extremists no damn sight better. We, as "the West", just supported some of the rebels because Assad also has the support of Russia and annoying Putin is currently all the rage, which is at the end of the day just a really silly reason to do anything and doesn't help any. A few years ago we thought removing Gaddafi was a good idea. Look what that has wrought, both for Libya, the EU and the people drowning in the mediterranean sea. Iraq is a mess. Egypt peacefully removed a dictator to elect Mursi (what a laugh) only to end up under the rule of the military after even more chaos and more protests. Given all this, why would handing over Syria to religious extremists the revolutionaries be any better? It's this chaos that allowed ISIS to gain a foothold in the first place, and between them and Assad, oh, well, I don't know, I'd freaking take Assad any day.

Warrior/Champion, but tanking is relatively boring and can be done well enough by the AI (standing in the middle of all the chaos is probably the only thing they're really good at). Knight-Enchanter and Tempest are powerful specializations. Artificer is pretty awesome too but requires very specific gear and one of the best companions is one anyway, so... go with Mage/KE for an easy first playthrough.

The original had more complex hit/miss mechanics and shots that kept going until they hit something or left the area, damaging anything they hit according to their damage roll and some things were easier to shoot through than others. XCOM essentially only allowed explosives to reliably remove cover and you couldn't even target anything non-hostile with normal weapons. I think it is somewhat sad that with so many teams trying to create spiritual successors to the original and each and every one comes up lacking in some way, even the official sequels, though Terror from the Deep was pretty much the same game without the difficulty bug and horrible, nightmarishly anthropomorphized lobsters.

Yeah, TToN finished the remaining stretch goals after the Kickstarter as well, maybe we'll get another one through PayPal. Still doubting that it'll reach the MCA goal.

The remake is a far superior version to the one that came out for the PS1, but the control scheme is the same. You can only walk forwards or backwards and turn very slowly, and you can't run and gun. The controller's gotten better though.

I "finished" (as much as you can, that is) Her Story. Actually it's fairly well done, but I have that song stuck in my head now. Will probably last a while. Damn. edit: Viva Seifert also reminds me a lot of Claudia Black.

Somehow I doubt that the Bard's Tale IV kickstarter will actually end up with 1.9 million in pledges. I hope I'm wrong because I really want that super-awesome MCA horror dungeon.

GSF balance is pretty good. Off here and there maybe, espeially for the Strike Fighter class which only has one viable ship, and that one is a supporter that intentionally sacrifices offensive power for buffs and repairs where the otherwise sub-par combat performance doesn't matter that much - but for a multiplayer PVP game with different classes of ships it works surprisingly well. That's probably because the last thing they have done was toning down the minelayer bomber a year ago, which it sorely needed. Can't break anything if you don't change anything. People still complain in droves about certain things but that is business as usual. Most can't cope with sucking, they sort of expect to be on somewhat equal footing with player who already played thousands of matches, but it really doesn't work that way. Nothing else in SW:TOR prepares you for GSF and the tutorial is somewhat lacking. The biggest problem it has right now is the terrifying skill delta between veterans, newbies and people who will never be good at a gaming mode that requires manual aiming, orientation in three dimensions and has no artifical lock to 40 actions per minute (also known as the 1.5 seconds global cooldown), but that's not something Bioware can fix, at least not without adding cross-server queues which the engine probably can't handle. The difference between players is so huge that a single ace or two can win the game for their team. I even had my very own hate thread growing out of a goodbye message of a player on my server on the German SW:TOR GSF board. It eventually turned into the second longest thread on the forum. /brag

She was also one of the few characters that were sufficiently fleshed out instead of gimmicky or downright silly like Sera or Iron Bull. I don't know what Bioware did with that game, I mean I still liked it enough to play for almost 150 hours but it feels as if it was developed by a team of interns with a little supervision by seniors. What made Iron Bull silly (besides his looks, or is that it?)? His motivations for joining made sense at least, or is it the romance (which I didn't see)? My favourite female character is probably Josephine, she just makes sense and though they didn't turn her into some sort of doll she doesn't look bad (not in the sense that Sera looks like Gollum...), though whether someone would consider her good looking is, of course, a matter of taste. I assumed Jaws of Hakkon was just more Hinterlands style crap, is it actually worth getting? Does it add some meaningful exposition? (which the main story is sorely lacking) Jaws of Hakkon doesn't add anything to the main storyline in any direct way, you just get exposition about the first Inquisition - the quest there starts this way, you decide to help someon look for the grave of the first Inquisitor. It's one of the better areas in the game and quite long too, and also pretty, uhm, challenging at times, compared to the rest of the game. I loved the atmosphere and the ruins, and no, it doesn't really compare to the Hinterlands. I didn't regret spending the money on it, but I also sort of liked the base game except for a few things. Iron Bull was too much of a wannabe badass. Always boasting about screwing everything under the sun and the one time it comes down to a hard decision (his personal quest, essentially) you get to make the decision for him. The romance was worth a laugh at least, but the rest felt rather like Bioware tried to force a badass into the game with a liberal helping of telling instead of showing, not to mention that cutscene where you whack him as training while somehow not managing to miss a single cliché - and not in their usual good way.