metadigital

I'm officialy lost, now.

Sssssssssssssss-T-Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike! You're outa the game!

No.

Quite.

You can probably buy a PC to play the game for $40 ...

Not much to see, actually. Lockdown time.

Fixed!

you're always outnumbered and usually outgunned: if you run into battle without exercising tactics you will fail. You can also literally wander around the entire map and do anything in any order. (Some quests only open up when you complete a prerequisite, of course.) It's what all the whingers wanted in the KotORs: the ability to interact (and keep playing after the end of the primary quest) with the environment.

Um, from memory it was just after the laboratory invasion ... the central premise was that seeing the planet wasn't alone in the universe (finally seeing all the stars, and concluding that there might well be many other inhabitable worlds out there) was enough to make the deists crazy and rampage around and destroy the world. (God lied to us, We're not the chosen ones, etc, etc.) Quite a subtle critique of the dangers of religion as a theocracy. Still, you are right, it wouldn't be much of a film: films are best with lots of action and less philosophising. :D http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455507/ <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Hee hee. Harsh, but certainly a viable opinion. Mr Dawkins's film was broadcasted on free-to-air tv recently, and it was certainly good to hear someone talking logically about faith-based matters, for a change.

Fixed! It's okay. I was annoyed that it was a dumbed-down screenplay from Isaac Asimov's Nightfall (the short story, which he later turned into a novel, with a co-writer, that was, incongruously, less good). Nightfall is about a planet that orbits a bunch of stars (six?) so that there is never a "night" on the planet. Well, when I say never, there is, but only every few millennia ... and historians from the current age track back to find a bunch of civilizations before their own, at regularly timed intervals ... that just happen to coincide with the predicted total solar eclipse due shortly ... much more satisfying novella. But the film was okay for an action title.

Clint FTW! REAL men watch all five films back-to-back.

Psst: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0311361/ It's better. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Actually, Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ is a better film for historical accuracy (the acting is not very good, though): Mel Gibson's effort is just perpetuating Roman Catholic fictions. Also, of course, Monty Python's Life of Brian gives some extra socio-historico-political background to the Palestine of two millennia ago.

You're talking about (arguably) the oldest surviving civilization on Earth, y'know.

in a fiction novel. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Metadigital is looking for Batman. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Indeed. I read a short story (Ray Bradbury?) where the police force was manned by only idealistic people: people who are incorruptible by dint of their Weltanschauung. They must retire when they become suseptible to corruption ... mandatory retirement age from the force was nineteen. :D (Joining age was thriteen, iirc). Then everyone went onto civilian life, having completed their military service.

sabre-rattling n noun the display or threat of military force.

clickie* * Google is your friend.

Should be less than fifty years before computers are more powerful than the human brain (the most powerful thinking engine in the known universe), based on Ray Kurzweil's extrapolations of human progress towards a technological singularity.

Who are you talking to, Eldar?

It's waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better than Morrowind.

+++ Lilandra : Reading Comprehension -1 +++

Sorry, I don't agree with your insistence that the problem is only caused by metagaming at all. There are a lot of us who are just playing the game as it comes naturally and for me it's obvious there are serious faults with the level scheme. Your suggestion that players "wait until you arrive at a good character build point" is, in fact, metagaming to me. There's nothing wrong with scaling. Applying it across the board with a poorly designed character development system causes all sorts of havoc - not necessarily for every character or play style but it does for many. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I never said the scaling system wasn't faulty. I hazarded a guess as to why it exists in the form it does in the game: one group of people want to reach level 150+, and another group want to wander around and do any and all parts of the game in any order, and some that want both. I then gave my personal solution to the game as it exists. Which, by the way, I didn't create in some grand strategy: it was just obvious that when levelling up I wanted my character to increase stats by as much as possible: a more efficient level process. Other people's observations that groups of level 50 monsters would pwn a level 50 PC just confirmed my conviction. As the game exists right now, it provides some enemies for the player to fight, who are just out of reach. That is a pretty laudable goal, and even if Bethesda don't pull it off 100% of the time, they have done well. Basically the game demands the PC use strategy and tactics to win battles, not brute magic power. What was it that Mal said to Zoe just prior to the meeting with Patience on Whitefall: "They've always got the advantage; that's what makes us special!". It's fairly easy to hit level 50 with the current system. If you can't take on the enemies at level 50 with all maxed out stats, what are the chances a normal level 50 character who specialized in a certain areas have a chance. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> No, it's not. Reaching level 50 is an egregious effort, not a mandatory one. I suggest you throttle back your desire to have your PC at the highest level possible, and try to enjoy the process of adventuring. I can't really argue that point, except to say that it is a tool: maybe Bethesda might have refined the mechanism a little bit more, but then again I am not privy to the design decisions that they made along the way ... I use insta-travel when I want to just get to the next bit of the plot, too. It allows me to only go wandering when I want to go wandering.

Believe it or not, I asked the store clerk for a game that I had read about in a magazine (which of course I didn't have with me, and I had completely forgotted the name of, and which they didn't have in the stupid store, anyway ) ... and he told me that Everquest was the game I described. I wanted to buy the first Dungeon Seige.

That depends on the semantics of "law", too. Just because you live in the jungle, doesn't mean there isn't a law (of the jungle) ...

I used to do commercial focus groups: free beer and pretzels whilst people ask you a series of questions about their new and exciting marketing ideas ... AND you get paid!

I'm glad that you come with (self-certified) sub-titles, Magical Volo!