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Creative Assembly’s Next Game Is Potentially a Hero Shooter Hell yeah. Another "hero shooter", just what the doctor ordered! **** immersive single-player experiences. **** non-recurrent spending. **** risk-taking. dO yOu GuYs NoT hAvE pHoNeS??

Yeah, I won't argue with that because I have about three hours logged in PoE. Regardless, I'm pretty sure that whatever the failings of Pillars, they cannot be used as a general rule for "X doesn't work" when X has been in fact shown to work in other games that aren't PoE, and when talking in the context of a game that isn't PoE. But sure, make fighter classes great again play exactly like 2E summoned skeletons.

It wouldn't even install for me. RE: AI. Good point. I got pretty dependent on custom AI scripts for BG2 to manage thieves, for instance. But again, it was more an interface and design problem than the fact that thieves had abilities.

So he played Icewind Gate 2, and has blocked any and all memories of either the vanilla version or the EEs?

Just channeling my inner HoonDing

Yes, you've said all that before, but you've failed to properly substantiate why it is so. Adding abilities to fighters does not make them "essentially fighter-mages" by itself, nor does it "homogeinize classes" or make combat roles less important. Hell, a Fighter does not become less effective at chopping stuff up because he uses Combat Expertise against another Fighter in one encounter and takes advantage of Power Attack against a bear in the next. Nor does he become more adept at stripping magical protections or able to heal others. Knowing how to disarm or trip someone does not make you a wizard. It does mean however that you have to know the class you're playing and do something with it beyond drinking a potion and charging. You may not like that you have to micromanage your party to succeed in the highest difficulty level (?), and that's fine. But now you're arguing that fighter abilities blur the lines between casters, tanks and damage dealers. I doubt anyone who has played any class-based game released after 2005 or so will buy that. Again, NWN2 and Spellforce are two rather different games where activated fighter abilities make controlling their positioning at all times a mandatory task for the player in order to make the most of the character. In neither of those games fighter types become comparable to casters in either stats, role, or playstyle. You seem to be hung up on your experience with PoE/Deadfire. That suggests that the "problem" is with those games rather than the concept of fighter abilities.

I didn't even know this was a thing. Still, Kurtzman.

How exactly does having feats on a fighter kill the need to position them properly? If anything, something like Whirlwind Attack and Great Cleave make positioning more important, not less. A lot of the things present in 3.5 are either passives or toggles that you don't need to fiddle with every round (Power Attack). Not in BG though -- there's only autoattack. And it's been a long time since I agonized between putting a star in two-handed vs sword and board, because two-weapon style was so crazy that the only justification for not using it was a paladin focused on Carsomyr -- and that was only in BG2. And then, a bit later in ToB, a two-weapon paladin could possibly outstrip a two-hander in terms of raw damage, if not utility. Two-handed was really weak because there was no 1.5x str bonus and you lost a slot for little gain. I don't know about Deadfire or PoE, but I've played BG2 with just about every class and kit, which is why I find pure fighters so dull. Chug a few potions before jumping in, cast (improved) haste, pop rage if applicable. Bombard casters with arrows in BG1 and Breach in BG2 and let the Fighter autoattack them to pieces. Boring. Then again, I much prefer turn-based, and I used to play BG with auto-pause at round end and spell cast. So I can understand how microing a 6-man party where all characters have special abilities in real time can get a bit crazy. That's a problem more with interfaces and RTwP than fighter abilities per se, I think. Spellforce managed to pull it, so it's certainly possible.

On the other hand, Dragon makes for a pretty decent melee mech. Punches harder than almost any other heavy, and is fiendishly fast at 150(!) speed. Max armor and depending on what you have available give it either more punching power or DFA damage reduction. Some JJ, and maybe 2x SRM6. Charge ALL the things! It's the Quickdraw you want to sell immediately, when it comes to heavies.

How is exercising your own discretion a "know-it-all western solution"? Is common sense an exclusive western trait now? I'm no expert and I suppose it's possible that letting yourself be taken advantage of is a big deal in some culture, but even so, I'm inclined to let them sort it out. They would likely appreciate western paternalism even less than the alternative. But by all means, don't stop being outraged on someone else's behalf on my account.

Sure. I just fail to see how this is worth even mentioning when the solution is as simple as not giving freeloaders money. I know I don't.

Well, obviously. If you intend to stay rich, you don't go around spending your own money.

Thanks. I guess I'm even more confused now. And this bothers people because of course it does?

TL;DW?

Oh boy. Pretty sure we don't need more YT nontroversy/he-said-she-said Twitter ballyhoo. Especially when it pertains to other games. It's bad enough that the general gaming news is already chock full of that kind of "content". Echoing them elsewhere only increases their exposition.

It isn't a bad game at all, and I'd recommend it if you're a fan of turn based tactical games and the BT universe. Especially if it's heavily discounted. It's just that... they seem to have completely run out of steam after finishing the base game. Maybe after the Shadowrun games, the bar was too high set. If they had managed to keep releasing content with a value comparable to that of the base game, it would have been glorious. I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm still butthurt about this.

I realize that you are interpreting it that way. Overt "insubordination" in a country with at-will employment is at best foolhardy, so I'm going to guess that you're simply reading too much into a fairly innocuous comment instead of assuming that junior devs would happily kiss their jobs goodbye over... a matter of perspective. Or do you know something we don't?

As per Betteridge's law: "no" Seriously, I'm not even sure what you're implying here. That members of the team don't think the game is politically charged enough? That they think it's excessively politically charged? Forgive me, I try to steer clear of culture war cesspits battlegrounds, so I may be missing some context. Seems to me that the tweet you're referencing is little more than a wordier rephrasing of the "views my own" disclaimer that many accounts display in their profile blurb.

Being free to rot and die is a rather limited view of what "freedom" means. Namely, just the absence of the state breathing down your neck. If due to economic conditions, you are forced to sell your labor for a pittance (because due to the reserve labor army, wage elasticity only benefits the owners of the means of production) under abusive work conditions, to what degree can one be truly free? If one could live off photosynthesis and reject these jobs so as to negotiate on equal footing, you may have a point. If the only thing you can do is die because of material conditions imposed on you through no fault of your own, you aren't "free" at all. You may believe that this isn't real, that it will never happen to you because you are much smarter and more hard working than that, but history suggests that you'd be wrong. Holding that viewpoint requires accepting the premise that everyone worse off than you is dumb and lazy. A self-satisfying perspective to set into, but not one that is supported by evidence. It also requires accepting that you are dumber and lazier than those who were simply born into riches, which is how most rich people nowadays made their wealth. It's funny because legal restrictions are much, much easier to flaunt than material ones -- breaking the law only requires the will to do so, but a former industrial worker in his late fifties whose job has been relocated to Vietnam can hardly will himself into a twenty-something big data expert mathematician. And yet, you insist that only legal restrictions matter when determining whether one is "free". Read up on the causes of the Greek crisis. It wasn't government social spending spiraling out of control -though book cooking was a serious problem- but rather private bank financial speculation and a lucrative credit bubble that was facilitated by the euro, central banks, and EU institutions. Other countries were also hit, and not just the PIGS, but Belgium, Netherlands and the UK, that paid billions to bail out the irresponsible private banking sector.

Have it your way. Perhaps you have an internal dialogue that justifies analyzing -and potentially discarding- some ideas but exempting others from similar scrutiny out of hand. Outwardly, though, that amounts to "just take my word for it". I really only followed you down the rabbit hole. No, I was explaining my response to GD, I didn't meant to imply that you held that view. Whether a majority is involved in the creation of one of these ideas tends to take a back seat to how useful that idea is compared to competitors, I think. In a supposedly democratic society this can cause contradictions, but practicality trumps intellectual consistency because of how memes are selected and spread. As for the coordination through myths bit. The ~150 individual upper limit seems to be empirically derived and the idea is that our brains cannot keep straight a much bigger number. Beyond that size, social structures start falling apart without cognitive crutches. So In this context, "myth" doesn't necessarily carry religious undertones. Much like the state, the working class for instance is a myth, because it doesn't exist in any tangible sense in the real world. It is a fiction upheld by you, me, and several other million people that helps us make sense of our society and work toward common goals without personally trusting or even knowing each other. The use of myths (such as "country", "legal framework" or "corporate branch") enable coordination on a massive scale. Common material interests alone aren't enough to bind together groups of thousands or millions because your immediate interests often won't align with those of the folks in the next village. And you really need not just cooperation but also precise coordination in order to do things like curing cancer or getting people to Mars. I'm not going to get into the degree of authoritarianism required for that to work -- that wasn't my point either. I'm open to the idea that, potentially, it could work without any sort of coercion at all. But I can't even begin to speculate as to how that would work.

It would apply in the same way as the ownership of people being legal because people agreed it is legal. Things like modern wage slavery, being forced into prostitution for a sandwich and privatization of essential resources present a threat to freedom in a practical sense. Of course, abolishing private ownership of land and capital goods may not solve those problems by itself, but capitalism does rest on it. Fair enough. I'm mostly interested in consistency here. You cannot hold the view that a foundational idea in society is simply an error by the majority (paraphrasing) while simultaneously believing that other such concepts -spooks- are immanent. Not without some serious mental gymnastics, at least. It's been argued that without spooks, myths and collective fictions, you cannot really run a group bigger than a hundred people or so with any degree of coordination, btw. Force or the threat thereof just doesn't cut it.

Interesting. Maybe consider applying that same reasoning to the private ownership of capital goods. And... weren't the French majorly involved in the American Revolutionary War? Happily for the rebels, Louis XVI had a rather cavalier attitude regarding "French blood".

Pretty sure that the only reason why the usual suspects don't employ child labor is that there aren't many child programmers to hire.

Somebody send Trump a ticket for Tank Biathlon '19.

Is that someone else's profile you're browsing or your own? I may or may not be interested in following myself, but the option just isn't there.