majestic

As a shotgun mage, this is highly disappointing. I don't think I like the new matrix. I just started, so it might grow on me, but the dissonance between time-based+character skill and real time+player skill is very real. I almost feel like I'm meant to get caught, then it plays like I'm used to. I think it's a flaw that high decking skill doesn't help with staying undetected. Btw, is there a way to use Suppression out of combat? I don't think you can use programs out of combat, especially not supression. That would kind of defeat the purpose of trying to hide from Watcher ICs. I fully agree with your criticism by the way, everything you do in the matrix is far too dependent on your skill as player instead of your skill as character, especially the hacking minigame is bound to frustrate players who are not good at that sort of thing - and the force option is far too pricey to really consider it. That would be semi-easy to fix, just scale the amount of trace you get from being caught or forcing blockers with the amount of decking skill the character has. Problem solved... mostly.

Yes, it does - it even works when you, for some reason, have more than four characters in your group, it is just a pain in the behind to use. When you click manage you actually need to drag & drop the item from the top to the inventory slot you want it placed at. Once that is done the equipped item will switch places with the item on top (the one you're trying to take) and then you have to drag & drop the item on top to the stash icon on the bottom. If you're trying to do that and you have more characters to work with you need to scroll through the characters by left-clicking, holding the mouse button down and dragging the mouse up or down depending on the way you want to scroll, kind of like you would on a touch screen device. I mean, sure, it's nice that after two games they tried to improve the user interface a bit, but the end result is just plain bad. Especially the item and equipment UI is terrible and sometimes buggy, for me half of the screen would simply disappear at times. The main menu was also often messed up - overlapping elements, sometimes the sub-menues "spilled" over to the main menu, and stuff like that.

I just finished the game. GOG Galaxy tells me I've played for 30 hours, but that includes loads of running around talking to people and double checking everything twice over - oh, and trying out all the ways to end the campaign. The endgame and some conversations are a buggy affair, sometimes the pictures of the characters talking don't show up, or they still show the previous character that talked, sometimes the spoken text is designated as descriptor text and vice versa and there are a bunch of skill and stat checks that don't work even if you are way above the threshold listed in the convo (they're greyed out). Yeah, and in the aftermath of the final battle you can get into an endless conversation loop with the tech vendor. Annoying. Also, loading the autosave of the aftermath messes up variable tracking in the game and leads to annoying inconsistencies like people wondering what happened to characters that are standing right next to them. I found that out after having to break off the endless talk the hard way. The hacking mini-game started out fun but old really fast. Much like hacking in Mass Effect or Mass Effect 2. Not sure what the point was. The new matrix system is pretty good though, I like not being locked in turn based mode all the time while traversing a system. The trace system is okayish and was only troublesome once in the entire game. Some thoughts about character generation and karma spending: Spoilery thoughts about the game and the storyline:

Well that might actually be in the proverbial Eye of the Beholder.

I'll probably keep on playing my beloved orc decker with ranged combat / assault rifles with loads of cyberware I lovingly called "Dekkah" because I'm really THAT good with names - well unless HK contains decking checks orcs can't meet with their missing point of intelligence, in which case I'll probably reroll human.

I got up early today and for what? Dammit GOG! Yes and... no idea. The game comes out today. Depending on the difficulty levels and your skill at battle Returns was somewhere around 15 to 20 hours while Dragonfall was 25 to 30 hours.

what, you were expecting the whole game? in a public alpha/beta they usually test small individual parts of the game to see if the mechanics and UI work as intended. play testing the entire game is done internally to avoid spoilers There will be a second alpha dubbed "B0" soon which will include combat and some more options and gameplay elements, like saving your game and tasks where failing actually has some real consequences. I mean, something else than affecting the colour of the light in the room. Which was kind of awesome though.

Heh, SCORPIO is probably one of my favourite companions of the entire bunch in the game. What's not to like about a psychotic killer robot dedicating her existence to breaking her controlling software and kill you??? So over the top its hard not to smile. It's like a mechanical Thana Vesh Problem with companions in general is the limited number of "barks" they have when summoned. engaging enemies etc. Eventually even your favourites becomes a bit tiresome to listen to when the class story is over. Apart from the never ending hassle with timezones, I should now have well geared level 60 healers and tanks on both Harbinger and Shadowlands and working on getting the few remamining ones moved from Begeren to Jedi Covenement. So if anyone is interested in running a few group activities, just give me a shout. Would probably only work weekends though. Also got two handfuls of leveling toons on all 3 servers as I don't expect the 12x xp to last forever, so they get a bit of priority at the moment. All of the IA's companions are bat**** insane. Even the most normal of the bunch casually kills her father because he saved her life (and broke Imperial law in the process of doing so). The rest... uh, a psychotic terrorist, a rakghoul, a killer robot and a Killik joiner, riiiiiiigh guys, I'm totally trusting any of you with my life.

I saw that one too. Warning, some spoilers ahead while I rant. The first part of the movie in the future way okay. In the original movie Reese tells us that mankind already won and sending the T-800 back was Skynet's last ditch effort to still win. So the entire "in the future" part of the movie was pretty good. Then Connor sends his father back in time and everything falls apart. We end up in 1984 where Emilia Clarke firing what looks like a Steyr HS .50 (which, uhm, went into production in 2004), destroying the T-800 with a single, well-placed shot, was the first big "uuuuh... WTF?" moment in the movie, then they do things and some more things, Reese remembers things that never happened because THE TIMELINE CHANGED, they dispatch a T-1000 with acid and go forward in time to stop Genisys from going online. Oh, Connor shows up, being transported back in time after having been terminatorized by Dr. Who Skynet. Then some more movie stuff happens, old-Arnie fashions a portable magnet weapon from a PA speaker and finds some other magical magnet stuff that is never used except for the RPG-ish things, but whatever. And then they blow up Skynet Genisys by putting the terminatorized Connor into his half-finished time-machine - because, as we know, only organic matter can traverse through time. Cyberdyne goes boom again and yay, future is saved. Sort of. Then they go and make those memories that Reese suddenly had. Eh... How did Skynet manage to send the Connorminator back in time when he actually goes BOOM enough to level an entire block in the time machine? How the hell did Connor and Reese survive in the bunker with that explosion going on not too far away? How did old-Arnie's memories and programming be transferred to the T-1000 liquid metal while everything exloded around it? Why does the sequel-hook Skynet look like HAL 9000? And finally... Daenerys Emilia Clarke was one striking miscast. Not because her performance was poor (well, it wasn't great either, but what can you do with that material) but because she's a terrible Sarah Connor. Blargh.

The money they made off PoE may or may not be "plenty" - we don't know any true sales figures and we really don't know about the actual game budget except for a few rumors about it being 6 million dollars (or more - but definitely ABOVE the Kickstarter budget). What we do know is that Obsidian was in financial dire straits before the Project Eternity Kickstarter and close to having to shut down, so it's not too unreasonable to expect that some debt was settled by the income - but that is just speculation as well. The one spreading misinformation here is you. You bemoan that people apparently don't understand your simple and reasoned post, but you did your best to misunderstand mine. I said that if you want to add multiplayer to Pillars of Eternity it would either have to increase sales enough to recoup the development cost or, if it would not, add some other way to reap enough cash to justify the resources spent, for instance with microtransactions. It is a financial risk insofar as there is little to guarantee that the added multiplayer will ever amortize itself, let alone actually turn in a profit. That's the way how business works if you do not have a steady source of income capable of buffering losses from high-risk projects (think of Google and their myriad side projects) - that is also why Pillars of Eternity was largely funded through Kickstarter instead of the usual publishing system. Oh, and by the way, stop lumping the Infinity and Aurora engine games together - especially when you consider that NWN was designed from the ground up with user-built single and multiplayer modules in mind. If anything, it makes you look disingenuous.

Also, you can kind of count on some of the features never making it into the final add-on or sucking completely. Oh how they talked about the "Path of the Titans" feature for Cataclysm and all that was left in the end was rework of the existing glyph system. Oh, yeah, and archeology certianly was fun. A bit like ball tortue. Except with dig sites instead of stilettos.

Jupiter Ascending. It's always a bad sign when I have to force myself to sit through a film, let alone coming veeeeeeery close to actually turning it off - that's a feat only Torque managed to do so far, and I have seen and sat through a lot of crap, including the D&D movie, so my tolerance level is fairly high. Damn I don't even know where to start ranting, so I won't even bother. Utter shice.

Indeed, DS9 is the best of all the series. Well, except for Vic Fontaine, he's almost as bad as Wesley. Who was absent for season 2, and the replacement had the charisma and cast synergy of a burning pile of old tires. *shiver*

The deal with Wesley is a bit complicated. Not only is he a Eugene Wesley Roddenberry stand-in he was also written as an obnoxious Mary Sue because of that. To be perfectly honest, even if that sounds unappreciative and maybe a little callous, it is not much of a surprise that TNG only really picked up after Roddenberry couldn't interfere with the production any longer. He also features prominently in a bunch of episodes where he saves the day and makes the other officers look stupid, but that kind of was a side effect of the writer's strike of that time. Allegedly a bunch of scripts were submitted from which to choose one where Wesley gets to show off but they ended up filming all of them because of the lack of new material. It's been said before but the gets put on a shuttle soon enough and then there is this one sweet time later on where he gets what he had coming. Oh, and another minor piece of advice. Do yourself a favor - when you reach season 7, pretend episode 20 ('"Journey's End") doesn't exist. Those of us unfortunate enough to have seen the original run or watched it later without that advice are scarred for life, but maybe you can avoid it. No really, I'm serious. Don't give in and don't be curious. That's not entirely accurate. I think you're right about Wil Wheaton, none of the scripts were his fault at all (well how could they), but DS9 was, quality wise, leaps and bounds ahead of the other Trek series, and Avery Brooks could easily ham it up to Shatner to boot - and before you say anything about the lame first two seasons of DS9, seasons one and two of TNG were horrible as well. On the other hand DS9 was the least Star Trek of all Star Trek. Well, except those JJ abominations.

I never had problems with it. They only thing that always confused me, was the Arena-Button. What the hell was that for? It seemed to do nothing. The Enhanced Edition actually did something with the button I think, but I never tried those so I don't really know. The original button MIGHT have referred to GameSpy, a lobby/matchmaking system that many games used back in the day instead of creating their own - players needed to install the optional GameSpy client and create a login for it to work. It went kaputt a few years back and took some older games' multiplayer mode with them. GameSpy only shipped with the North American release of Baldur's Gate so I have no idea if that is it.

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.