majestic

Oh boy. Midichlorians or not, the fact alone that "the Force is strong in [Luke]" after knowing about for for a day or two just tells bare and plain that is some innate ability and not something gained through training and meditation. Empire Strikes Back then shows that you can improve upon your innate abilities through training. The idea that the Force represents some religion or mythical force that anyone could access through training and faith is a (now apparently proven false) assumption on your end. Nothing else. You're making an awful lot of those and then react annoyed if your own ideas don't match up with those of the writers. Do you do that if reality isn't to your liking as well?

This makes no sense. First Lyrium is a magical substance that gives you access to the spirit world. It is hardly HNO3 or whatever. Secondly in DA:O it was just a skill Alistair could teach anybody, like one might teach any combat skill. So I am not sure what the basis of that assumption was. You did not get any scene of Alistair teaching you intense meditation or anything. Of course lyrium is a "magical substance" but actually it's a mineral dug up from earth, is "magic in raw form", so in other word means it's "the Fade" in chemical form, since magic come from the Fade, lyrium is a physical Fade. You consume it, you get the Fade inside you. But according to Alistair in DA:O, we don't really need lyrium to learn Templar ability, that give the impression that Templar ability is something you gain by dedication, training and understanding of religion (this goes the same with Jedi). I compare the ability with Spirit School magic of DA:O, there is so much similarity, so i assume the anti-Magic line of Spirit school is NOT actually magic, well the school itself is ANTI-magic. Since Spirits are The Maker's first children, there you can get the conclusion, Templar have the connection with the divine influence through their understanding of religion and dedication in their faith. I assume it is just the Chantry who is corrupt, want to control the Templars by giving them lyrium to make them addicted, also fooling them by saying lyrium increase the magnitude of their ability Furthermore, anti-magic is NOT magic isn't it? So why would lyrium that is "magic in raw form" giving anti-magic effect for Templars? Eh? For me, there is NO justification for "you really need lyrium to learn Templar ability" in DA2 and DA:I, it totally toss away the religious side of the thing. You are no longer gain power by your understanding and dedication in religion, you gain your power by chemical substance and manipulate it. It have nothing to do with divine thingies, therefore those divine thingies don't exist, religion is fake So now you guys understand my argument? P/S yes you don't see a cutscene video but you get the dialogue scene from Alistair "i could teach you" and "sent everyone who is trained as a warrior" implying Alistair DID teaching Templar ability WITHOUT lyrium There is a thing called story and gameplay segregation, and becoming a templar as player character is a huge part of it, no matter whether you actually need lyrium or not. Templars are the militant arm of the Chantry, and through long, dedicated training and lyrium (or not, depending on which writer you like to take at face value) they achieve powers that help them fight mages. And then you come along and become a full-fledged templar with the abilities in 5 minutes of gameplay and none of the training, without the need to join the Templar order or take any vows. You can be the most sinful person on the planet or you could be a saint, it doesn't matter. Because it is... well, gameplay, and when push comes to shove gameplay always wins against any story considerations. Always has, always will. So riddle me this, regardless of the retcon that templars need lyrium for their powers: Where do the Seekers get their power from, it obviously isn't lyrium? Oh, right, dedication, training and being touched by a spirit of faith. So that's the in-game answer. The real world answer is probably that someone else at Bioware thought David Gaider was full of crap when he retconned Alistair into having taken lyrium in that Dark Horse comic and introduced a secret templar faction having templar powers without lyrium intake just to spite him and get back to the argument of whether it is just a control element or not. For you, the answer can be "oh, like, maybe they didn't like the idea of no religious background for Templar powers" while coming up with DA:I. For Luzianus that answer would probably be because the Maker took pity on Cassandra for looking like a man.

Indeed, even with the midichlorians as an explanation (one which I intensely dislike) joining the Jedi or becoming a force-user in the first place was limited to a select few. Jedi are simply space wizards (or sorcerers in D&D terms because their ability is innate, not trained). Sure Vader gets called out on adhering to an outdated religion in A New Hope, but it's not like anyone could use the Force if they wanted it enough, or were religious enough. The midichlorians suck butt like much of what Lucas did with the prequels, but to construct a science vs. religion debate or conspiracy out of them is ludicrous at best and borderline paranoid at worst.

Sure, because using the not really modding-friendly Frostbite engine was totally Bioware's decision. And why did they choose so? Because when they are not busy enough with creating their satanist illuminati conspiracy they get a kick out of hating you in particular. Yeah, that seems just about right. Lex parsimoniae be damned, stupid Ockham obviously had no idea what he was talking about.

You're not missing much by not having played Legacy as DA:I neatly gives you enough exposition on the matter. You're just left wondering what and who the hell is going on at first. IMO the main story picks up a good deal of pace after Haven, especially if you're interested in DA lore. You know, that awful statanist conspiracy is just about to start and all. xD edit: You're right about the game being slightly offline-MMOish. As I posted a while ago, there was way too much Bethesda crap in my Dragon Age.

Hiho. *waves* It's probably more accurate to say that this is the first time I actually use my account to post a bit. It's been around forever, I just barely ever checked back here after the community split up into loads of different boards. Nice to see so many oldies around. ^^

No, I don't think so. 99% of the people probably don't even bother with the lore. She's just really good and interpreting things the wrong way, which is why I said it is willful. Nothing of the sort really happens in the games, and nothing of the sort is written in the lore. It's just her willful misinterpretation, and I say willful here because it's not possible to read that much text and accidentially get everything almost but never quite right, and it is liberally seasoned with flat out lies. Or she never played the games and just read about the lore on some weirdo conspiracy site, in which case she's a victim of exactly what she's saying Bioware is doing. Having an agenda. Take the interpretation that the Darkspawn are the Maker's curse to punish the hybris of man, yeah, it's not like there haven't been real life precedences. The bubonic plague was seen as exactly that, a punishment of God for sins committed. So did the Catholic church in 14th Century Europe have an anti-religous agenda as well? I like that interpretation, so I'm keeping it. Bioware is just an extension of a catholic conspiracy that started seventeen centuries ago when emperor Constantine apparently converted so that heathen pagans eventually would be able to destroy it from within.

No, she does not give you credit but you can use her to spawn an infinite amount of robes that sell for a surprising amount of cash and can be broken down into components. After you train with her and she is in her underwear just tell her to put on some clothes. She'll equip a robe, just take it away again and then once again tell her to wear clothing. Repeat for as long as you like. I'm not really sure if the bug has been fixed by TSLRCM, which is about the only real way to play KOTOR2.

Geez. Of course it could work, (A)D&D is a turn based game after all, so any turn based implementation of the rules can and would of course work. Which is entirely not the point, so whatever.

Reminds me of people telling me that they never watched The Addams Family because it was "just a Munsters clone" - not only did both TV shows start airing within a week the frigging Addams Family was based on a comic that premiered in '38. Geez.

It's been posted before, but no. In "true" turn based games that do not have concurrent action like the RtwP Infinity & Aurora Engine (well not counting The Witcher, obviously) games your characters cannot move while the enemy is making their turn. You might be able to dogde or otherwise block attacks, make saving throws and whatnot, but you cannot move or otherwise take action to prevent impending doom. It is possible with the Haste buff or the Boots of Speed to outrun AoE spell projectiles (Fireball, Abi-Dalzim's Horrid Wilting and others) in all the IE games. Simultaneous movement lets you run out of the enemy's range and makes them follow you after engagement. It lets you heal your characters while the enemies pelt them with everything they got. It lets you quaff potions at the same time the enemy is trying to target you. The hit point to possible damage per round ratio is so skewed in favor of damage in Baldur's Gate 2 that without concurrent rounds the combat experience would end up being horribly frustrating and/or boring. Especially when you instantly fail the game the moment your main character goes down because that intelligence draining illithid you could easily outrun with concurrent action has a lucky roll streak and you die. Game over, reload. Could it work? Possibly, I mean it is possible to create a nigh-invulnerable juggernaut of doom within the game rules and unmodded combat it somewhat easy with a few choice exceptions. Metagaming on the other hand would just go from being a bonus for power gamers to necessity and it would suck the fun out of the entire experience for a lot of people. Otherwise Age of Decadence would have a lot more sales. That game really is designed to kill you in every way imaginable and making a successful combat oriented character is an art in itself, and a point of endless reloads to boot because combat difficulty has been tuned so it is hard for metagaming munchkins that know the ins and outs of the system to succeed. It's really awesome (also it has non-combat alternatives for pretty much everything, even if it might simply be to not do a sidequest) and I never regretted investing the 20 bucks the unfinished version costs but it will always be a niche product. Extremely niche, at that.

I still don't know if you're just an account made purely for satire and trolling or if you're genuinely giving lead a run for its money when it comes to density, but you're pretty entertaining, I'll give you that.

Whenever someone says that all I can think of is this. This is a serious game.

Woops. My bad, for some reason I mistook you for the original poster. Edited the post. ^^

Turn based games have their encounters tuned to be doable and DMs don't routinely design encounters to wipe the group. Well, unless you're the developers of Age of Decadence or your name is Gygax, in which case you would do exactly that, but the point still stands: If you simply would impose TB combat on BG2's cheeseball encounters you would end up with a game that is either unplayable, boring, or in some cases both. The same applies to PoE's encounter design, which is arguably not up to par with other RtwP games anyway. So, well, my answer to the question posed by this thread still is: No, not without a complete overhaul of the encounter design, and even then you'd have a chance it would turn out to be like Wasteland 2, a game which I liked but where the TB combat was a massive drag instead of interesting once you finished the first area or two.

The thought of taking BG2's encounters and putting them in a turn based game without concurrent combat rounds (which IE games basically are) is frightening. Enemy mage group just won the initiative roll? Yeah sorry, eat two or three Horrid Wiltings, not to mention the thought of Kangaxx winning initiative. Now that would be glorious. Some parts of the system would lend itself rather well to TB implementation, like engagement. The game would need a complete encounter design overhaul if it went turn based though, the current encounters are sometimes cumbersome enough with concurrent actions. Granted, one could argue that PoE needs an encounter design overhaul anyway, but that's not really point of this discussion. Yet.

As the epitome of the German computer gaming magazine proponents of the PC master race (sorry, I can never really resist taking a jab at the dolts working there), in the past PC Games generally defined flüssig - which means, among other things, fluid, liquid, flowing and and which in this case should be indeed contextually translated as smooth - as having a lower bound of 60fps, not 30fps and they routinely call bullcrap whenever someone says that 30fps is enough for a, well, flüssige gaming experience. As you already figured out the gist of the article is that you should be fine on Full HD with Ultra details if you have a quad core CPU clocking in at 3 GHz and a graphics card with at least 2GB provided you don't use the Hairworks feature, which, as they explicitely stated, kills game performance even with nVidia boards on their high-end system whenever the game shows a close-up of Geralt's head or more than a few monsters using Hairworks on screen.

There are some nice things on sale this weekend (especially Grim Fandango). I also upgraded my Wasteland 2 to Digital Deluxe, not because I'm that interested in the novellas but because the upgrade also contains The Bard's Tale and the upgrade on sale is actually cheaper than The Bard's Tale. \o/

Uh... no. Most, if not all, turn based systems in video/computer and tabletop role playing games feature an initiative check of some kind. The first turn goes to however wins initiative and not to the enemy per se. Some (like D&D) even have a surprise round if you catch enemies unaware after which normal initiative applies, potentially giving the heroes two rounds of combat where the enemy can't do anything at all.

You forgot to mention that Bioware secretly experiments on puppies and helps "big pharma" to enact their plan to reduce the world's population to less than a billion through evil affliction causing additives in vaccines. I mean, seriously, would they be called BIOware otherwise? Willful misinterpretation of lore: Bringing the world fun, games and crazy consipiracy theories since 5000 BC.

Turn on auto-pause after combat round and it'll even play like a turn based RPG, just with your and enemy turns happening at the same time. Which isn't unheard of in TB combat games. It just makes combat in KOTOR very tedious as it goes from queuing up flurry, critical strike or force lightning and watching into queuing up flurry, critical strike or force lightning and pressing space every 6 seconds. Bleh.

Yeah, don't you know, if you accidentally open the wrong door in the Water Temple with one of the small keys is really becomes an a-class pain in the butt to complete it. Not impossible, but really, really annyoing. Longest time I ever spent on a dungeon. Of course, the most time I spent getting into a dungeon was that bitchin' figure eight puzzle in the desert. But that's neither here not there.

For what its worth, my GOG KOTORs work just fine on Windows 7 except for the occasional bug where non-interactive dialogues or in-game cutscenes skip from the first line to the last immediately. Restarting the game fixes that for while but it never completely goes away. A friend of mine however had crashes with the GOG versions but none with his self patched retail versions (except for not being able to play any movies), so GOG did change something that might give people who otherwise have crashed and issues on the other versions a fighting chance. Unless of course you're trying to run the games on one of them Intel integrated HD series GPUs. In which case getting the games to work is nothing short of an uphill battle. One where you're outnumbered, outgunned and have to dodge a landslide on your way up. Good luck.

Sure Neverwinter's set in Faerûn, generally follows D&D's (Forgotten Realms) lore and implements the usual races and classes but the actual ruleset is more of a loose adaptation. Very loose. They kept some names and descriptions and had an action point system and... I think that was about it. Not sure how it is now I played it while it was in Beta and then never really looked back. The gameplay is also very DA2-ish just without any of the flash and style, animations were terrible and made the game feel somewhat unresponsive. The game is okayish to decent and it's free assuming you don't let it trick you into using the in-game market so if you're ever bored and have nothing else to do it might be worth checking out. I'm sure it has much more user created content now than it had back then and there's bound to be a decent module or two to find. The most awesome one I checked out was simply a chain of 50 rooms where each contained a single ogre, purely designed for maximum XP gain to grind away. It rocked the most played lists for a while. Yeah. I'm not kidding.

You pick it when leveling up your wizard or copy them from a grimoire, if it is available in one, I'm not really sure. I stopped bothering with copying spells after figuring out which ones work well and you can choose enough of the worthwhile ones to easily get you through the game. Ah, who am I kidding, spells come from the land where happy spells bunny hop across lush meadows and magic trees rise in the distance while the glaring rays of daylight wash over you.