injurai

e.) Are horse challenged.

Sagani is almost taken to just be a short inuit human. At least that's how I saw her the whole time.

Yoooo, that Tonya Harding pic is too real.

I suppose I owe it to myself to check out the Divinity games if they go on a deep sale just to see what's up. They never gave a good enough impression to merit a full price purchase from me. As you said, the D&D rules are already doing a lot of work for this game, as it's an immediate improvement on what Larian has done of their devices alone.

It's been a while, but how much "barrelmancy" (thanks for the lol) was in DA:O? IIRC, that game was one of the first to really push environmental and spell synthesis. Usually in the form of oil + fire = big AOE fire. I'll be honest I never really gave the Divinity games a chance for the following issues I experiences with DA:O's approach. Seeing as Divinity tried to take this facet and make a whole game out of it. The problem I always had with barrels and other such things, was that they are never well distributed throughout the game. When they are present, they are usually a huge boon, which leads the encounter design being stacked against you with the understanding you'll use the environment hazard. Or there aren't any hazards, and the encounter is planned accordingly, thus being smaller in scale. The use never feels like a strategic choice, but an obligation that is being put on me by the encounter designer. As such, I almost always hate them. Position and approach, a la tactics games, is always way more enjoyable than the *wink wink* buffoonery of "barrelmancy." As much as I'd love to be Captain Jack sparrow at all times, it just doesn't really work well when the path forward is laid so obviously before you. The rare hidden "shortcut" often just makes things too easy and thus less enjoyable, then just toughing out an honest win. Why would I click *skip* on perfectly good content? <rhetoric question intensifies> Now if enemies had ways to abuse the environment against you that you had no way of foreseeing without significant expenditure of investigation checks, then I think I would like it more. Which is why traps never had the aforementioned problem for me. The only problem with traps is that they are rather boring and monotonous to deal with.

I had the same thought, that this should be a brand new D&D series. However, BG3 get's them on people's radar. Hopefully they do a brand new series/setting as a follow up.

Pillars 1 for soulless babies!

Another game that does verticality well is Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, who I have someone here to thank for introducing me to. (forget whom) This could be a new trend, but I don't think that is a bad thing. Certainly ledge play in Total War and SC2 where rather important parts of those games. What I hope is that environment is given the Deus Ex treatment, where you can enter an environment in varying ways that drastically changes what tactics are viable (without limiting you to the strategy of that path.) TF2 maps very much play with that idea as well, whether you enter the opponents base from above, below, front on, or through the back. Think back to Pillars 1, Raedric's Hold was mostly sectioned off by floor. You didn't have the capability to split your party between floors either, and levels weren't designed that way. I think BG3 (for whatever it's eventually faults) is at least promising something new and potentially highly satisfying.

Still not sure how I feel about TB in general though, I love it in 4x games. I don't think I can digest my impressions by merely hoping around segments of a 2 hour stream. I need a condensed writeup on all the mechanisms.

My takeaways: Graphics are gorgeous, and I think this is the first game that really convinces me the isometric angle can look good without doing pre-rendered scenes. Love the verticality I like how rolling checks works. Art direction looks incredibly much like Dragon's Age Origins. Which is good and bad. TB combat looks a lot better than Divinity, looks almost like they took clues from Deadfire's TB mode. The game will have the advantage of being balanced around TB from the start. Love that huge action bar, that's properly treating someone to a nice time.

Looks like a Dragon Age: Origins x Divinity: Original Sin crossover game rather than BG.

Well the "gameplay section" was like a single attack (with probably a non-game camera) and cinematic party vista. Hardly "gameplay" even if in-engine.

Pretty sure that's just a cinematic trailer. Done music-video, go-pro style. I doubt that's gameplay.

For some reason I thought this released and flopped, glad it's still brewing. Seems interesting.

If there is anything I know about next-gen launch titles. It's that they are uninspired derivative shovel-ware cash grabs, meant to capitalize on the low hanging fruit of slapping the newest shader technology on everything. It's the psychology of the graphical hike that gets people, filled with promises of being in the works longer than the previous end of generation titles. But it's the opposite, it's taking everything that comes for free, and gives nothing that is worked hard for. The only reason Breath of the Wild was a launch title, was that it was 6 years into development. Was meant for the Wii U, and was used to kick-started the Switch when Nintendo panicked at the Wii U's flop by essentially resetting what their hardware foundation was. Games like Killzone Shadow Fall come with the added benefit of being 1st party, and thus feel less generic than the 3rd party flavor of next-gen launch titles, but often still suffer from the fact that hardly anyone owns the system, and thus they are mostly developed at a loss, and typically are underbaked in some essential way. Let's be honest KZ is rather basic other than an above average art direction. Occasionally a big title ends up cross-gen GTAV and soon to be Cyberpunk. Those aren't launch titles. More than anything it's just publishers packaging up the test games that weren't made while practicing on new dev kits, and slapping the reject pile art and narrative design into them.

I always thought it was weird another studio was jumping on 3. Figure the studio doing the remake would be better suited if the first sells well. Shame though, I was looking for a return of Warren Spector.

I feel sick

Scams exist, I also think you have people pursing dreams without the capital, business, and even technical/creative savvy to pull off their dream project. Life events can totally derail these projects, like healthy concerns, losing one's primary job, etc. I think kickstarter somewhat eschews the responsibility of the backer in taking risk. Traditional investment is much more centered around risk. I think since people aren't buying into a company they are left extra entitled that they receive the product as the payout. But once the project falls through, you do have people endlessly drinking from subsequent funding despite the project clearly being in the ****ter. Those instances are certainly scams, but it can be hard to tell when the project keeps telling people what they want to hear. Which is why normal investors might actually sit on the board of a company, can walk through the studio, request proof, and generally control allocation of budget to specific sub-goals through a accountants and a producer. But you can't get your average person to actually take an skillful and more involved approach to half the things that they are willing to throw cash at, and let other's do all the hard work, then bitch when it doesn't meet their expectations. Grassroots venture capital as a lot of growing up to do.

Thinking that way means you can't be morally righteous and indignant, which is no fun. After all, you can't have fun if you actually play games.

Syd Mead, 86 Easily the greatest Sci-fi artist of all time, and probably forever more. Now the vision of the future is so diluted, over-shared, crowded. Never again will their be such a stark authoritative vision of the future brushed into the zeitgeist. http://sydmead.com/