majestic

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.

I heard they made that bug a feature called peasant or ampersand or something*. See, because calling bugs with French terms kind of gives them this neat aura of legitimacy and us common people don't even know what it is about. Bloody France. * Disclaimer: I know it's called en passant.

The joke worked better in my head than it did on paper. Erm. Post.

Talking about races in the newer D&D books would probably take too long, but yes, there have been a host of weird changes, like making Gnomes fey creatures that at first weren't even among the playable races at a time when humanoid dragons were. In 4E, Halflings kind of became wandering folk - nomads. Quite the oppositve of what they were in other D&D editions. I don't know, maybe WotC worried that they were just a little too similar to Hobbits or whatever, really.

lol? what genre of fiction did poe create? With The Murders in the Rue Morgue he essentially created (modern) detective fiction and its associated tropes.

I don't know guys. I mean Poe helped creating entire genres of fiction, isn't it a little unfair to compare that to the guys writing at B... oh, wait. /thread Btw since nobody mentioned it yet and with all this talk about DA:I I think it is worth mentioning - EA essentially forces all their divisions to use the Frostbite engine for all their new products. The basic idea is that if everyone uses the same engine it is easier to transfer talent between games. Sound decision from a business and efficiency perspective. *shrug*

TL;DR: People who would get a cRPG following WotC's 4E or 5E D&D rules would be in for one hell of a rude awakening. 4E and upwards D&D rules are exceptionally streamlined and easy to use and have thrown a lot of the concepts of earlier editions out of the window. The contrast is quite stark, to say the least. Everything has been made a somewhat balanced mess of sameness which sometimes doesn't really make sense. In 4E for instance every class has at-will, encounter and daily (per extended rest actually) abilities selected from a certain somewhat smallish pool that is made even smaller by "specializing" your build by selecting one primary stat. That means your wizard will never run out of spells and always have something they can cast, even if it is just their at-will. Just so you get an idea what an at-will might be, for wizards, one of their at-will is magic missile. For rangers they get one that allows them to shoot their bow twice per standard action. Most races start with two at-wills, humans start with three as a racial bonus that is completely worthless because there really only are four at-wills for every class - and only two go by the same primary stat (e.g. Clerics can pick from two at-wills that add the STR modifier to the hit roll and 2 that add WIS to the roll) making the third a relative non-bonus. 5E is... even worse. 5E gives every class a distinct template where actual choices happen every few levels, well more or less. Most of the time you choose once at level three and are on a set path. Barbarians for instance can choose a primal path at level three which with subsequent level ups allows them to pick from a fixed list of abilities - if you're lucky, that is. Berserker Path barbarians never really choose anything for their class, they just get abilities on their chosen path. This removes the illusion of "choice" you get from 4E where you could in theory pick different abilities but can't unless you don't really want to hit enemies with them. What both editions do, and 5E even more so than 4E is that they make it impossible for you to mess up your character unless you really can't read and assign your abilitiy points in an inept way. The really fun part is that both editions were somewhat made with the idea of licensing them for computer games. 2E AD&D was fairly common, as was 3E. It's beyond hilarious that rules so obviously easy to adapt for cRPGs (much, much easier than AD&D or 3E ever were) never really got picked up for licensing. Time to rethink your licensing model there WotC.

But it's necessary in the fight against the Others. \o/

Stated twice already, but for the love of all that's good and right in the world let the Eclipse engine rest in whatever hell it has been banished to. I have no idea why but all Bioware developed 3D engines somehow only seemed to be able to handle four colours: brown, mud brown, dark sienna and black. There's a reason Hawke says "Kirkwall isn't brown enough for me" in jest at some point during Dragon Age 2 (yeah technically it's the same engine with some added bells and whistles but Kirkwall sure is a bit more vibrant than Ferelden).

Oh boy, there we go with the non sequitur.

More like full of hyperbole sprinkled with a helping of having no clue, considering how he talks of always hitting with Gaze even on PotD with Aloth the "non-optimized" wizard, as if custom wizards would have better accuracy. Also, slaying Firkraag with Finger of Death for instance isn't nearly as hard as he makes it out to be, depending on your party makup that fight is over in 6 to 18 seconds, especially if you're at a level where you can cast Finger of Death already. You only need to stack Doom & (Greater) Malison if you want to pull off a sucessful one-shot kill with Chromatic Orb at level 12 because that has an annoying +4 bonus to the save, but even that doesn't take that long. As for making it harder to deal with trash mobs because a spell somehow hurts the sensibilities of someone who considers it a cheat, dear god, it's boring enough to to deal with certain areas of the game. Please, for crying out loud, think of the children. And my nerves. Post 1.05 Gaze has been fondled enough.

I checked, it's on the list of known errors: - games imported from existing installations will auto-update once, even if updating is disabled That also means if you import your game into the Galaxy client it will most likely trash all mods you have installed or render them unusable by reverting files back to the default state. That happened to me with Privateer 2: The Darkening, there's a deinterlacing patch that is pretty much a must have because the full motion videos are unwatchable otherwise and it's pretty much gone now. Not big a deal because it's only one small fix but I don't imagine it is so nice to have it kill your dialog.tlk in Baldur's Gate. Apparently it is also quite normal for the client to not recognize older installations, something to do with compatible installers. I sure hope they plan to change that because that was highly annoying. Especially since that too forces an update. Hooray. \o/

The client is - and according to CD Project will always be - completely optional. It helps organizing your account and has some additional features, but there is no DRM planned to go along with it that forces you to always be online or have it running while playing. Of course it won't be able to update game statistics if it isn't running. edit: Oy, restarting GOG Galaxy just started a host of game updates. Apparently you can't turn automatic updates on in the general options (the checkbox is disabled) but that doesn't stop the client from doing it anyway. It just didn't do anything during the initial start, probably because the automatic import of my installed games messed up somewhere. Beta indeed. edit 2: Ah, the joy of updating Wasteland 2. For some reason the Galaxy client is currently downloading 21 GB. Bloody hell.

It's a GOG management client like the Steam client or Origin that eventually is supposed to have similar features like automatically keeping your games up to date, track time played, feature achievements and all that jazz. It's a little rough around the edges at the moment - it failed to regognize most of my installed games which now has me adding them manually. I have no idea if auto-patching works (I doubt that because it can't be enabled in the options) but importing my Pillars of Eternity folder upgraded it to patch 1.05. Installing games from your library is a much smoother experience with the client, so that alone might be worth it. I also assume that it will remove some of those silly patching issues with the way they released patches in the past, I think I reinstalled Wasteland 2 twice because the patches were sort of messed up with their internal versioning. It's still Beta so most features are, uhm, kind of missing. It's also supposed to eventually enable cross-platform multiplayer e.g. for titles that are released both on Steam and GOG. The first game to support all the clients bells and whistles (including achievements) is going to be The Witcher 3, for sort of obvious reasons.

Well, let's just agree to disagree here. Kesselack's Tomb is the reason for most of my IWD parties to fail. I reach the Valley, fight 50 yeti, enter the tomb and go like "ah hell, this goes on for three levels and 200 sekeltons, I'm outta here" and go play something else. I'm curious though, where do you see the tactical and stragegic challenge of fighting hordes of skeletons strewn with the odd mummy or two? It really IS a logistics nightmare though. Extremely heavy yeti pelts too profitable to pass up force you to haul stuff back and forth, same with the loot in the tomb(s). No wonder PoE had an endless bag of holding unless you actively turned it off.

There are a few decent ones, among them A Final Unity, a TNG based point & click adventure that even reviewed well. I still have it lying around here somewhere. Of course it's not yet available at GOG. Out of those I really only played Starfleet Acadamy and that one was a bit of a letdown. It's just when it came out it tried to follow the Wing Commander approach to space sims - FMVs combined with space missions packaged and wrapped in a Star Trek: TOS skin, but doing neither as well as WC. It just never lived up to the hype. Interplay hyped Starfleet Academy for three years. It was essentially bound to disappoint. Fun fact, a certain Chris Avellone is credited with "Additional mission design" in Star Fleet: Academy. Heh.