majestic

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.

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. Animations, character design, parts of the writing, quests, none of that were really up to par, not even when compared to DA2, of all things. It's baffling, and also a little annoying because the potential was there. It can be seen in Jaws of Hakkon, for instance. How typically EA to sell the best content as DLC. Javik anyone? Pfff.

Are you comparing SW:TOR to other MMOs or making a comparison to single player RPGs, especially the KOTORs? Because even WoW, which is arguably the "best" theme park MMO around is pretty bland compared to them. For an MMORPG, SW:TOR is pretty good and I think GSF is something that is still unique to MMORPGs (obviously not talking about World of Warplanes here). It's too bad the genres didn't mesh so well and GSF became a somewhat niche activity in SW:TOR. I enjoyed teasing (and quite literally obliterating the hell out of) those MMORGP PVP heroes who thought they had skill. As if moving in a 2D plane with abilities that auto-aim takes skill.

Theme park MMOs without new content die pretty quickly so it's not much of a surprise that SWTOR still gets additional content. The new expansion seems to take advantage of not being strictly bound by continuity any more.

I guess they added the unlocking trough game completion part after realizing that unlocking them through doing quests in the random insanity of the game is too much of a chore, both of which being decisions I personally don't mind but I can completely understand why you would be bothered with them. I haven't unlocked that many ships yet because of that. I was kind of hoping for the quests to show up but getting stronghold/homeworld sectors is rare enough, and then finding that one system to start? Meh.

I just had one of the easiest games of FTL ever. Started with the Type A Stealth Cruiser and figured I'd be in for a rough ride, but the RNG gods were benevolent this time. Ended up with a Burst Laser Mk. II, the Dual Laser it starts with and a Glaive Beam - and I managed to find a Weapon Pre-Igniter in the second sector which made not getting shields until later on manageable. Nothing except the Flagship survives an opening salvo of five laser blasts and the Glaive, or if it does it's in no condition to fight back. The only downside is that with the cloaking and easy killing my crew piloting and engine crew had almost no level ups, but who cares. Actually managed to survive the first two Flagship phases without hull damage. The third phase was easy as well but they did manage to fire a hole or two into my ship. Bloody supercharged massive attack is on less of a cooldown than the cloak. Of course that luck didn't last and the next game actually killed me off in the first 10 minutes. A failed rescue mission and then a large boarding party out of a refueling station, no, that didn't end so well. Easily the best 4€ I spent on a game in a long while. Yay GOG sales.

There are a terrifying amount of golfers who die due to cardiac arrest each year. It's not just boring, it is dangerously boring.

I guess this thread really just confirms it. Luzianus and MILF Lover are two distinct aspects of the same gestalt. That's some mighty fine logic here, hard to find any arguments.

Tried Xenonauts today after getting a free copy from GOG for buying enough of their summer sale stuff. Haven't played enough to really form some sort of fair judgement but so far it seems like straight up UFO: Enemy Unknown clone with improved interception mechanics and different graphics. I hope it'll give me a reason to continue to play it at some point, rather than starting another game of the ancient ones.

And they are secretly represented by Wael.

It's kind of like that 4% chance that your weapon jams. It seems to happen every other shot until you modify the weapon and the problem goes away. WL2 really seems to have a random number generator specifically built to torture the player, or the interface lies in your face and every fail chance is multiplied by 10 whenever it is below 10%.