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I didn't have much trouble, (almost) no reloads. I found both bandit camps harder (the one with the hostage near Teron and the group that has the mountain monastery under siege). But that's probably due to the builds I used. One was a spearman exploiting the spear pushback proc, and the other was a crossbow/dodge assassin. The Teron mine garrison only has one ranged guy, and that encounter allows you to start with advantageous positioning and ample room for maneuvering, whereas the bandits fights don't, unless you start combat manually. But even if you do, their archers are bad news.

The difficulty in AoD came from getting into fights with non-fighter type characters. A properly specced fighter that made liberal use of poisons, bolas and nets would find very little trouble. I'm wondering where the difficulty is going to come from in a combat-centric game where the player is expected to be combat ready. Unfair encounters, most likely, and enemies that spam that **** as much as you do, probably. I'll be getting this one for sure, but won't play it for a while. Took a few patches for AoD to be really polished, from what I read.

well it will be more flashy, but I really doubt, many of the games will play at 60 FPS. "Cinematic" 30 FPS is the new trend of the industry. Yeah, 60 fps really isn't even on the menu these days. When I tried to run DAI at 60 fps, the cutscenes got horrible throttling that couldn't really be done away with, even after tinkering with the inis. A buddy of mine tried uncapping FO4 which yielded really funny results at >60 fps, with sentences not finishing before the other guy cut in (TL;DR effect?), and scripted bits outright bugging out, breaking the game. RivaTuner fixed the dialogues thing, but not the broken scripts. 30 fps is a design spec, and I'm guessing that just phat hardware isn't enough to overcome that. #pcmasterraceproblems

But really. That's not at all how you set up a deep state. Give one branch too much power and you risk them getting ornery and daydream of launching coups to "protect the Motherland". Even more so when the current head and prospective Minister is a senior military official. The smart way to go about establishing a proper police state with a democratic façade, is to make sure that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Kind of like the NSA and the FBI. Get with the times.

DO EET One of the most fun games I've played the last few years was Metal Gear Rising, a console game through and through. Good thing I kept my PS2-USB converter from back when I used to do PES5 marathons with my friends, because playing with KB/M was just painful. Swallowing my PC Master Race pride never felt so good, tbh.

Don't hate on Biles for having more of a V-taper than you, oby. Also, phishing? Really? What's this, 2003?

DLCs are terrible in that regard, though. Encounters dropped on top of your head -literally, mobs spawning right in front of your eyes- for no reason. And player-leveled encounters at that, throwing the difficulty curve of the game out of whack. That single-handedly broke my enjoyment of New Vegas DLCs.

Such a wasted opportunity to tackle the issue of ethics in video game journalism... alas. But at least we banged, ok. ( ) Regardless, I've seen fan voice acting that was at least decent (1), so it's certainly not an impossibility. If they aren't restricted to the extremely reduced pool of hot video game "journalist" broads to pick from, I don't see why not. I'm not expecting Tony Jay, but it's just a marketing gimmick and the clips will be used for some random nobody on the equivalent of the Citadel.

This came out fairly recently, English version of it anyway. Can't vouch for English writing as I'm playing it in Czech (and even that's not too great) but it's finally a big chunk of Fallout after Fallout 2 released. The English translation is good. I didn't find any glaring errors, but I'm not a native speaker. As for the writing itself, I thought it was surprisingly good, especially for a fan project. It's a bit wordy at times, which seems to be a common feature of fan productions, but the tone, characters and plot are clearly set up to be reminiscent of FO1. None of the over-the-top silliness of FO2 or grandiose self-infatuation of FNV, that I can remember. I liked it very much.

I read on Reddit (don't judge me) that another dataminer said Guard is now an ability gained from the tank tree. Stances being passive and gained from the discipline means the tank stance requirement is redundant. So while it's technically true that it doesn't require tank stance to be active, only properly specced tanks will have a Guard to throw around. But yeah, boring. I haven't even bothered to follow the plot past chapter... I don't even know, something in a forest. But from what I've read, it looks as though they just don't know where they are going with the story. Funny, just like the gameplay, the meta, and the business model...

Not really a "discovery" per se, though I'm sure at some point they'll discover what caused it: Not the first time something SpaceX explodes, either, but that's gotta be a serious blow to a non-(completely)-gov't funded organization.

Sure. It makes perfect sense from a financial standpoint to protect your investment as much as possible, and play it safe. I wasn't suggesting they should act differently or that it's not a sound business strategy, because their success attests to the fact that it very much is. Problem is this means financial reasons are dictating design decisions, which then are going to be passed off as "improvements", when in reality they can be anything but. That's where marketing comes in, and at it's usually at this point that I go into anaphylactic shock from all the PR talk. In the particular case of EA, success also means they tend to buy up studios that I personally like, to turn them into soulless Madden-churning machines, and finally close them down when all the juice has been sucked up. It's the way of things, maybe, but that doesn't really help with the butthurt. I also shake my fist at clouds FYI.

"Classes have been simplified to make the game more approachable for new players." What new players? Just go ahead and rename it to Star Wars: The Sims Republic, already. Couldn't be any worse than what they've been doing since 4.0 dropped. A 5 level cap raise because that's right what's needed to look even more fabulous while you show off your neato CM gear on fleet, or "play" through the monthly 15-minute cutscene snoozefest. And yeah, shank tanks were fun, but it's about time they did something about that. Jugg "tanks" topping DPS in regs was ridiculous, and this is from a jugg tank player. But instead of fixing how the #1 mitigation stat is useless for PVP, they just up and nuke the layer of complexity provided by stance dancing. Worst of all is I'll probably throw at least 12€ their way to satisfy my morbid curiosity. Bah.

I'm not sure it reinforces your point, though I wasn't necessarily disagreeing with you. Evidently it's players gobbling this **** up. That doesn't mean DAO players demanded further consolization and, uh... the rest of the changes that DA2 and DAI brought. It's like saying that fans of Ciudade de Deus would rather have more movies in the vein of Transformers 2 made. It's all part of EA's business strategy, and they've been doing it across the board. Aim for the absolute widest possible audience for all your product lines, and if that upsets long time fans of <IP>, well, tough. If you sell more copies than if you didn't, claim "SUCCESS!!1". If you don't, do it anyway, but can any sequel plans and dismantle the corresponding studio.

best game I never played

Meanwhile at Sony HQ... No, seriously. Why the **** would they do this? Bethesda games' only redeeming quality is their moddability. Who are these people?

Funny, that 2010 Bioware have them beat in this regard. In DAO you could try and fight your way through a party that was obviously designed to be, if not unbeatable, certainly overpowering. Defeating the encounter meant missing the jailbreak sequence. Beyond that, the consequences for your choice there weren't that far-reaching, but at least the game allowed for it, mechanically and narratively. Fast forward a few years, you have Biower producing a turd of an ending in three different flavors, and an Obsidz that wants to protect its players from "bad choices". DAO isn't spectacularly profound in its C&C, but when it does it better than your game, well, maybe some reflection is warranted. Don't do drugs bad choices, kids. (brb just signing up for a KKKodex account real quick)

Cool. So you can play as a Super Mutant in FO4?

I misinterpreted you, then. I assumed you at least somewhat care about AAA gaming, what with you posting that Jim Sterling rant and so forth. I'm in the same boat, myself. I built a gaming rig recently... but have close to no interest in any AAA titles. And I've tried. Couldn't stand DAI's MMO-lite gameplay for more than 3-4 hours. DOOM came free with my display -- still prefer Brutal Doom. The games I've enjoyed the most in 2016 are Age of Decadence and Fallout 1.5 Resurrection. I'm currently playing Fallout New Vegas with a bajillion mods, a game that came out in 2010. Need to check what all the hoopla around TW3 is about, though. @Ros: I am a late 90's consumer, and early 2000's. A ton of bells and whistles covering completely unambitious design a masterpiece does not make.

I don't know mate. While the video is informative if true, seems to me like management/the higher-ups/suits are just doing what they've been hired to do -- the butthurt is misplaced. You won't find (m)any people going "YAY microtransactions in my single player game!", but look at the profits these big name publishers are raking in. The market rules, and the market keeps vindicating EA/Ubi/SQEnix/etc, year after year. Might be time to find another hobby. Or just stick with the odd indie, once every few years.

Well. As Zoraptor said, blacklisting can only really be evaluated after a pattern. A single instance does not make a pattern. However: Bubbles is one of the two interviewers-to-be for the Gamescom event. Note, interviewer. Not editor, not "staff", not janitor's second cousin twice removed -- for those of you having trouble keeping track of who's who, whose personal info was asked for, and when. On the other hand, this from Brother None: Sorry man I’ve been slammed with GamesCom prep, but wow did that stuff blow out of proportion, haha. 36 pages?! So Brian and the rest of us didn’t get to see his schedule until a couple days ago, but he’s fully booked. It’s all tier 1 sites so I don’t know if Codex was ever going to be on the list but regardless our interview schedule is fully slammed, nothing we can do about that. Honestly though I know from experience both as a journo and a dev that you should be very careful with anything shared in confidence, better safe than sorry on that stuff. But just to clear up a couple of points of confusion, I don’t think your press demo was cancelled, I’ll ping Techland to clarify that – oh and you’re free to drop by our entertainment demo as well, of course! Also, what’s this about blacklisting? You’re not blacklisted by us or Techland, that’s just nonsense. I know what I've read from the Codex. So 50/50 chance it's bull, I guess. As for pledging, I backed W2. Wasn't particularly impressed, and didn't finish it, so despite liking TToN's pitch, I'm adopting a much more conservative wait-and-see approach this time around. Especially after the console release announcement. :smug:

These complaints, are they more or less petty than blacklisting a site for raising a stink about your PC-exclusive console release?

I read the whole post, and the problem I have is not with the tone or the message, but rather, the facts. Presenting facts impartially is apparently less important than railing, for the umpteenth time, against "the left". Here's the "freedom of expression against PC" that was being prosecuted: (much art, so freedom, wow) You won't see me defending hate speech laws. But I'm thinking the same response would have been triggered if an "artist" had begun posting "Behead those who insult Islam" posters around, much like what happened to Abu Hamza al-Masri in the UK. The "artist" is also apparently a PEGIDA supporter. But that's ok -- far left is a no-no, but we don't care about the far right. Seeing as how he didn't get committed or declared insane, I guess the prosecutor's request to have a psychiatrist examine him amounted to nothing. Note: it was a prosecutor's motion, not the court's. A single prosecutor being a tool is hardly proof of a far-left government conspiracy to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids suppress any dissent against PC and immigration. And no. Raising concerns about immigration in Sweden is not an offense punishable with four years imprisonment. If it were, the whole Sweden Democrats party would have been thrown in jail. But what do I know, I'm not a "journalist" like Pamela Geller. Oh, crap. I guess that means I'm lying down grinning, and bearing it, right? Ah, why bother.

What's with the fascination with rape around these parts, anyway.