majestic

Kidnapped by aliens so they could steal his game design secrets, managed to escape but decided to go back to the aliens because they have more advanced technology and a better medical plan. On a serious note, I think the most popular theories right now are: a) Going to InXile b) Going to Bethesda c) Burnt out and taking a break from game development I don't think it is the burn out. He could simply state that he's taking a break, why the secrecy ("can't say yet", "ideas keep growing") if it isn't at least something related to game development. Well unless he really made a pact with aliens and will be the first human ever to fully develop a working perpetuum mobile.

Well he got cookies from Bioware, so he joined the Dark Side and will be developing mobile f2p games. Stay tuned for Dragon Age: Mobile and... wait. There WAS a Mass Effect mobile phone game so I'd better stop talking. Blech. =(

HULK SMASH!

Well, the Frostback Basin is by far the hardest regular area in the game. Actually, if you play on Normal difficulty I'd say even some boss fights are way easier than just the Basin (not the ruins) alone, especially those rifts can be a real pain in the backside. I'd say be as high as you possibly can get before going there, but if you're slightly masochistic you might have fun with less...

Should have clarified that. Every non-sport game is going to run Frostbite in the future, as per EA's announcement. So Frostbite becoming so popular is not only because the engine is good, but because EA actively tells their divisions to use it. Now if they're really going to Frostbite the next Sims installment, who knows? Fact is, we're going to see a lot more Frostbite and a lot less everything else that EA needs to fork over royalties for - hence ME4 going to use Frostbite instead of Unreal. The rest was pure speculation on the technical shortcomings of DA:I, not all of which are related to shoddy console porting. The entire game feels like a first installment with all the associated problems and shortcomings, or at least I'm hoping that was the case. I want my next Dragon Age to be something else than Skyrim with Darkspawn and Templars. Beh.

As for the discussion of how DA:I failed to find its own style, that's partly EA's fault. I posted it before but I'll post it again - EA decided to force ALL their divisions to use the Frostbite engine to create cross-division talent synergies (I get how that makes sense from EA's POV). Which also means that Mass Effect 4 will use Frostbite rather than Unreal. While I have no idea how much developtment went into DA:I before this engine switch came along, however, if it was in the middle of the process that might just explain a good bunch of the games engine-related shortcomings, the controls among them (not the 8 abilities limit but the unresponsiveness). So that out of the way I seem to be the only one who liked the main plot and it's massive implications on established Thedas lore, and besides you get to be the first ones since ancient Tevinter to walk through the fade in person. How's that not awesome? Solas' comments alone had me nerd-discussing things for hours upon hours. My main gripe would be that the storyline isn't very long and less verbose than I would have liked, but hey, it has Origins beat by a mile. Mostly because Origins had no plot what-so-ever (like ME2). I wonder if all the pointless filler content went into the game because the main plot was so short or if the main plot became so short because they ran out of time creating all the pointless filler content. I wished more areas were like Emprise du Lion. That didn't feel pointless, it was still fairly large but focused on a goal with tangible relations to Corypheus' plans. Unlike, say, silly Storm Coast.

I'm sure there's an anal-rentitive OCD anonymous group somewhere who would really like them to tell you their story, it's just that we certainly don't want to, in case that you missed the result of your poll entirely.

If you want them to be less annoying look for a little help online. YouTube is full of videos explaining how to kill them high dragons in 10 seconds or less. On nightmare.

System Shock 2 is 85% off currently. If you haven't played it yet, NOW is the time to get it. Respect the will of the many. Glory to the flesh. Glory to the mass.

Whatever they have planned I sure hope it isn't like combat in Anachronox.

Seems like that is what Bioware copied when they made DA:I's "tactical" mode.

Not only for them, their families stand to profit enormously as well, and they don't even need semi-well paying jobs for that. We had an indian colleague working a menial warehouse job and he sent every last unused cent back home. Every now and then he'd go back on vacation and come back showing pictures of his home and family. Yeah. Said home is a large, beautiful mansion on a huge estate, nice gardens and a really awesome pool. On the wage of a warehouse guy pushing boxes all day.

I bet all those pinko-commie leftist garbage people here will come to complain soon.

I especially liked the comment on how poorly her post was written and that Bethesda would never hire poor writers.

I was more thinking Shub-Niggurath but it could be any one of them - or worse, ALL of them.

I'd also want more and, well, more current games on GOG but only if they don't lose focus on their actual job: Getting the good old stuff to work with no DRM strings attached. Call me paranoid but there is something dark lurking in the deep recesses of Galaxy, patiently biding its time, poised to strike. Wouldn't be the first major disappointment though, there's a reason why I so stubbornly refuse to use Steam for anything after Valve began to mutate into the scary behemoth it is today.

Not really interested. I generally believe Bethesda games to be highly overrated (well Daggerfall was at least innovative) but that is simply my opinion. A bunch of my friends and co-workers racked up hundreds of hours playing them and still can't believe that I don't like them, but they're not really bothered by the combat systems or the utterly boring NPCs that usually populate their games. Nothing I've seen so far would convince me that this one can be any better. I don't know how they manage to be so wildly successful and never really manage to pick up at least SOME writers that can make you care about NPCs or form a coherent plot worth following in a game so choke full of distractions that oooooh shiny...

Why not? Andraste was after all a real person who led a revolt against the remains of the Tevinter Imperium. You're not called Herald of the Maker in the game after all. /wordmincing

If a dwarf dies in a cave and no one is around to witness it, is the combat mechanic flawed? Hm, then what is the sound of one axe grinding?

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Also, I love the 30$ Tier. It's just plain epic and had me laughing hard.

Back the Early Bard Premium Collector's Edition.

Psssst. A game was ready for launch when McPartyson doesn't experience a bug playing it and it clearly isn't working ticky boo when he does. You could of know that, silly. It's the only sane and objective measurement for buggyness.

Well that's awesome, I'm not sure how you get the idea that this particular gamer is fifty years old because "just shy" of a quarter of a century is a little less than 25 years. So in essence that guy isn't even old enough to be able to use nostalgia goggles on the good old days of computer gaming where you bought a game and actually had no idea if you even could make it work in the first place (the CD version of Strike Commander was an especially egregious case because early CD-ROM support by Microsoft required a truckload of memory, and by that I mean 45 kilobytes), but that was all at a time probably long before that guy diddled himself for the first time. So more realistically for that guy we can go back 15 years and look at Baldur's Gate 2, a game that had an annoying habit of corrupting your savegames without you noticing because some area you haven't visited in 40 hours but needed to go to after coming back from Spellhold died, or scripting bugs that rendered your game unfinishable if you saved at the wrong time and then loaded that save. That took some fiddling around with Near Infinity to get those damaged saves fixed. Which we did on the tech support forum without ever thinking whether or not we should be paid for that (well Interplay did give each of us a free copy of Lionheart before it died, but I'd rather not talk about that game). Coz we, you know, cared. And people would wait patiently for those fixed save games and politely say thank you instead of raging on like the whiny entitled kids of today. There are some good points on that opinion piece by the way, especially about DLCs and microtransactions. The gaming nostalgia not so much, at least not for PC gaming. On consoles, oh yeah, you never had a chance to get a patch 20 years ago so the games really just had to work but they were also a lot less complex than today's games. Having to download 10GB patches before you can play a console game these days while waiting hours for it to be installed, well THAT really is ridiculous.

Don't tell me that you believe that Hollow Earth crap too? Oh well, why am I surprised...