213374U

Silver man, silver! Gold is no good against those damn lycanthropes! edit: I'd just settle for being the guy that gets to count the money...

You can never be too obersturmfuehrer.

You can't put a price on good taste.

http://www.deadlystream.com/forumdisplay.php?f=123 ^ TSLRCM. Those guys release stuff first, build hype later.

Overrated.

Well, yeah. It's nowhere near as cool to go around saying you're fighting for theocratic oppression and return to feudal society worldwide. And virgins in the afterlife. FOR GREAT JUSTICE!

Yeah, no need for nukes, really. Just keep pushing eastwards, until they become the Chinese' problem, too. Those guys know how to deal with troublemakers alright. There ain't no problem a bit of old fashioned Stalinism can't fix... 'cept economic depression.

Wow.

Haha, I bet they ain't so happy they forced ol' Pervez out anymore.

An animal being vermin does not mean violence against it stops being violence. It might justify a humane culling or something, but it doesn't suddenly change the meaning of violence. Yeah, I guess then that putting your hand in a snake hole and getting bitten and dying as a result is "violence" as well. The only difference is that a snake does what it does by reflex, while a human shooting gophers that chew on the crops operates teleologically. I'm not really interested in being dragged into yet another internet semantics debate, anyway. So, yeah. Eating meat is MURDER.

Sorry man, but the filter knows full well what it's doing: cοckroach.

You beat me to it. Default Shep is one of the most handsome characters I've ever seen in a game. But how are they going to justify Morrigan's pathological obsession with collagen in-game? I haven't played the last PoP, and I doubt I will. The last game of that sort I played was GoW2, and I was so bored with it that I couldn't bring myself to endure it for more than two or three hours. But to answer your question, repetitive gameplay is a game breaker for me. In fact, once a game starts getting repetitive (by design or by virtue of a bad challenge curve), my interest level takes a nosedive. If the story or other elements have me hooked and there's nothing better around, I may finish the game. But you can bet I'm not replaying it.

Gophers are vermin. There's a damn good reason to shoot them. Where's the "violence" in that? It's not like she became desensitised to violence by doing drive-bys on homeless folk. There's also nothing "macho" about it. But then I think bullfighting is pretty retarded too, so what do I know.

That's all I have to say about the matter, really.

One day I'll tell you about this game where Trotsky took power in the USSR... Perhaps you could afford the luxury of ignoring the media, but the publisher can't. And you can't ignore the publisher... Exactly. I'm surprised that Purkake had to resort to Torment when point-and-click adventures are a much better example of games with no combat whatsoever and a strong focus on story. Still, those games have their own gameplay mechanics, and those must be good enough so that puzzles are fun to solve. Thanks for the heads-up. Looks good.

Yeah, but you have also conquered the world by 1947, so you're cool.

I think that's supposed to be a joke...

Yes. If you can't lose, you can't very well "win". Uncertainty in the outcome is one of the necessary conditions for something to be a "game". If you remove that, you no longer have a game, it's something else. I don't know why but lately I'm getting this weird idea that game devs in some genres are attempting to minimize the chances of losing as much as possible, while keeping the illusion of challenge -- "excessive" losing can result, as alan points out, in the player giving up on the game, and devs don't want that. Of course, what constitutes "excessive" is up for debate; however if you keep lowering challenge standards, then we'll eventually reach the point where a game without a win button will be deemed "too challenging" by some people that aren't interested in actually playing... they simply want plots and characters spoonfed to them. Why have we seen huge advances in graphics but innovative AI and gameplay design are, for all intents and purposes, stuck? Nah, couldn't be. Better tell my shrink. That's your problem. I play games for GAMEPLAY (who woulda thunk it?) If you are looking for "experiences" in that vein, books are the way to go.

Couldn't that be easily solved by an exponential XP-level curve? You'd have a hard time for maybe two hours after the confrontation, but your new companions would catch up pretty quick. Just thinking aloud here.

I'm going to trust you on the "impossible to proceed" thing, because you have actually played the game and I haven't. It's hard to think of a recent BIO game that puts the player in a situation that's worse than having your tank (Sarevok) turn on you for the fight with Melissan, though. I have to say, having the player's actions result in massive NPC hate which in turn leads to their deaths sounds awesome... shame they watered down the consequences.

Are you suggesting that this is a dev gimmick to prevent metagaming? Because I get the feeling this is a dev gimmick to minimize, at worst, the piss-off factor of writing railroading, and at best, the consequences of poorly made choices. Sarevok and others had some chance to turn on the player in the final confrontation of ToB. The player could find ways to metagame around that but... so what? The line between metagaming and cheating is fine indeed, but that's irrelevant because it's a strictly single player game we're talking about. If people want to metagame or use cheat codes... who cares? It's their own enjoyment of the game they are compromising, not mine. This is no big deal because I can always forget about NPCs back at the camp. But I still don't understand why.

Wait, wait. Are you seriously asking for financial advice? Here? \o/ Ahem, seriously now. I have a friend that can help you double or even triple that amount in the blink of an eye. Something to do with Nigeria, guaranteed profit. I'll PM you the account # where to make the deposit.

For a game that puts so much emphasis on story, this setup makes no sense at all, from a story perspective. What sense does it make dumping the faithful, battle-hardened companion Z, who has been with the player since day one, to take the green companion X that has spent the whole game sitting by the campfire, for the EPIC END FIGHT? Imagine Frodo suddenly going, "sorry Sam old chum, you'd better go back to the Shire. I think I'd feel safer with, say, Elrond once I cross the Black Gate..." Also, the alternative has worked fine in the past. I just don't see the need to constantly re-invent the wheel. Virmire revisited? Ok, ok. I'm stopping now... We're discussing the gameplay. This is a game, last time I checked. Feel free to comment on other aspects... but since the game isn't out yet, we gotta work with what we're given. People complain about this and that. You complain about people complaining about this and that. Where does that leave you? Is there a weekly quota of hours spent here you must fill or...?