Sarex

On what information do you base the size of their economy. I hope you don't think what you read on the internet can really show the intricacies of a countries structure and military might. Also military might doesn't only equal economic might. China is great power because it has it's massive population and also because of it's top down culture. People here seem to think that war has become cleaner then in the past, that technology has somehow fundamentally changed it, but that is only the construct of the media. What still counts the most in any war is how many boots you have on the ground. You are very misinformed if you think that America could wage a full out war with either Russia or China. If America ever attempted a land invasion of either Russia or China they would get eaten alive. The same would be true in reverse for Russia, for China I'm not so sure. World Power America may be, but it is not all powerful as can be seen in the Ukraine conflict, while it may be willing to strut and posture in the south the same cannot be said for regions near Russia or China. What I'm trying to say is that while it's power may be greater then that of Russia and China, it is still not great enough for direct conflict. Russia may not be able to project it's military might like America can(yet), but it sure as hell is boss of it's own back yard. As for Putin I don't know how you would think that Russia hasn't prospered under him in the years since the cold war. I don't think you are aware of just how far down the ****-hole Russia was after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Under Putin the Russian leadership was united and made to work. While Russia might not be the standard of economic prosperity (yet) it has certainly moved leaps and bounds in stability since the collapse. Putin wouldn't have been able to hold the rains of such a large country, if he didn't have something to show for the years he has ruled. That is very naive view you hold for the Russian governing body. I think that Putin is scoring big points back home right now and is showing the Russian people that Russia is still a force to be reckoned with. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive to say the least.

I don't know what you know, but I do know that this isn't a big budget game that requires massive amounts of work(in the scale of game making).

Missed the point again, it's not easy, but it's not as hard as the work in large 3d games.

So what you are trying to say is that you know what people liked better then they them selves do. Ok, well I believe that what people liked in bg was not the gameplay and the iso view, but the hipster feel it made them experience. I think we are getting somewhere here. Soon we will create the game that everyone likes.

Then why not simply dial it back using difficulty settings. If you introduce permanent death in the upper difficulties of the game, then why not also scale those hard-counter spells with difficulty. I get that you don't like metagaming, but to be honest some(a lot?) of us do. As you may have read in this and other threads, some of those hard-counter/metagame fights were the most memorable and exiting for us. They were a challenge to beat and prove to yourself that you could beat the hardest thing the game throws at you. In fact the best fights were completely optional. I really think that there is room for both and that there is no reason to make metagaming a bad word.

Most recently? That explains a lot. If my family had a stake in Gazprom, I'd probably be raised as a Russian apologist too. It's funny how having a different opinion that isn't cynical gets you billed as a troll or a sheep. As for Russia, I guess I'm a little skeptical because it's the country responsible for keeping Poland under its boot for 154 out of the last 200 years, with a long track record of imperialism, warmongering, genocide and ethnic cleansing, atrocities, totalitarianism, and crappy cars. That's just the 20th century alone to boot. Plus, it's helmed by a former KGB officer and recently confirmed that it's a hostile foreign power, so it's not really arbitrary skepticism. As for "free gas", TANSTAAFL. I've worked as a small hotel receptionist for 3 years and had quite a few Russian guests. They were never the Oby's type, but nonetheless they all (literally) shared one common trait - they were kinda "patronizing" (for the lack of better word) and couldn't (or didn't wanted to) understand why Poles are so stubborn about being left alone and not willing to get back to "one big happy family". I want to stress out that they were never hostile or angry about that, neither did they felt offended by our denial of those sentiments. IMHO it was more similar to the confusion of a small child who's mommy and daddy hate each other. Child that's to small to understand why do they have to live separately and how could they claim it's "for the best". Coming from a broken family, I think it's the most suitable comparison I could make. Go back more if you want, plenty more.

But then isn't it like that for anything else in the game, you can reload if you fail or are caught unprepared. Where do you draw the line at what is annoying and what isn't, as this is a very subjective thing. If you step in to a deadly trap you simply reload and avoid it, if the enemy does a certain combo and gets you, you reload and plan for it. I am not sure I follow how that is different from anything else, is the problem that you can't outplay it or what?

I have seen bigotry posted by more users then Oby, what about them?

Source of the image. http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&u=http://heideg.livejournal.com/378761.html%3Fthread%3D35667081&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dhttp://heideg.livejournal.com/378761.html%253Fthread%253D35667081%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26hs%3D8Tv%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26channel%3Dnp%26biw%3D1680%26bih%3D906

Monte if he starts banning people for expressing negative views towards people of other ethnicity, he is gonna ban 90% of the people in this thread. Oby already mentioned the Zionist movements a couple of times in his post and hasn't showed any outright hate towards Jews and as this is the off topic part of the forum he has a right to post anything he wants if it's within the rules.

Sure just give me the model of you MB and I will tell you what PCI-e you have. Though I have PCI-e 1.1 on mine and the 560Ti is designated for PCI-e 2.0 and I have no issues(though performance could be affected, no way to know until I get a new MB). The more important thing is the 12v rails, if those are not powerful enough expect system crashes. edit: you can also download this tool http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/ and check the bus interface. The number after @ should be the version of you mb PCI-e slot.

Watch out for the 12v rail power cables, and if your psu has enough amps in them to run the card. Also worth checking is if you MB has PCI-e 2 or 1. These where the things I watched for when I bought my 560Ti for my rig (which is also 5-6 years old).

Pretty much, the whole movie is wtf, I came out with a headache from it.

Watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Could you elaborate, I don't understand what you mean by script.

I think you are being very subjective. IWD2 was a good game and while the story was not the best and it was linear, it's gameplay eclipses that of any IE game, not to mention the setting, atmosphere and the soundtrack. I am currently playing IWD and I haven't seen a single thing that is better then in IWD2 (the soundtrack is atrocious). So for me I truly hope that PoE is the closest to IWD2 gameplay and setting/atmosphere wise.

http://usarmy.vo.llnwd.net/e2/-images/2008/05/01/15170/

Troll away Bruce, troll away.

That would just be ramping up in difficulty of the fight. Would it be over the top? I don't know as I haven't played that encounter. That would just be bad game design, but the facts are that beholders follow the rules of the game, you are given the tools (spells, summing, the shield of Baldurian), so it is very possible to beat the encounter in many different ways. Unfair doesn't mean unwinnable, unfair means that the rules that apply to you don't apply to the AI. I made some examples in the above posts. My last opinion on sucker punches is this, it's hard to do them when you can save the game where ever you want. In the example of the 2 Beholders, the game auto-saves for you right before that encounter, so even if they surprised you, you will lose nothing from it.

Burce aren't you going to ask for a source, or some link so you can prove it's not a lie. I thought you had a big speech about how you were all about truth now.

We call them Russians now.

I love save-scumming, I have at least 10 save files in every game I play. In DA:O I just spammed new saves, had around 150 of them by the end.

Your point? I really don't understand what you tried to say here. None of those games are fair, the computer gets an advantage in each one of them (deals more damage, takes less, has more health). Dark souls being the prime example, the only hard thing is to get used to the sluggish controls and to memorize the AI movements. Heart of Fury mode in IWD2 is harder then any of those games in any difficulty and it's still fun to play. It does this by giving you stronger weapons and much stronger enemies. As I say you can't really make a smart AI, so in order to make him challenging you have to give him an unfair advantage.

To be honest it would have to be something ridiculously over the top. Kangaxx would have been a sucker punch for me if you just entered the room and he was there without dialog or a quest (collecting the body parts), but he wasn't. You had to collect all the body parts some of which were in the middle of a hard quests, you knew that when you put the body together nothing nice was going to happen. I can only hope that PoE will have a fight like that. What people don't seem to understand is that games have to be unfair to be challenging, AI's are dumb and I don't see them getting smarter anytime soon.

I don't think that would be possible, but to answer your hypothetical, no it wouldn't I would just need to find another way to kill them. I would probably use spell turning+spell shield+spell immunity and set most of my characters to ranged attack.