newc0253

you have a full class list for DA? or just the starting 3? yeah, thought as much.

really, why? this ain't the Bio boards, it's okay to make fun of Bio here. what do you mean 'we', paleface? from reading this thread, i've discovered that Dragon Age will have ruins! actual no fooling ruins! whoda thunk it? wait, somebody made a Fallout 2? i can't wait to play it! i just hope they keep true to the original. actually, i wouldn't mind if they changed the setting from post-apocalyptic wasteland to bronze age greece, and i also wouldn't mind if it became a PvP griefer game instead of a CRPG. but they better have kept it turn-based with an isometric view, otherwise the entire game will be ruined!

so it took four years for folks to figure out there will be dragons in Dragon Age? and also ruins? and religion? and currency? Bio sure is generous with the details, huh? DA will make a big change from all those other pristine, atheistic, money-free fantasy CRPGs we've all been playing.

lots, huh? okay, then. what's the full list of playable races? oh. you don't know. classes? oh, you don't know that either. maybe even some stats? damn, volourn, just what do you know?

it is? funny, because Bio would give its left nut to make a game as irrelevant as D3. you mean Bio? don't make me larf. DA was announced 2004 and what the frak do we know about it? let's see - we know: it's set in some place called Felderen PCs will have a choice of origin stories magic is mana-based that, folks, are the three 3 things i've learnt about DA since it was announced four years ago. impressive, huh? whatever keeps you amused, buddy. dunno about being first in line but - unless the reviews are Pools of Radiance bad - i've no reason to think i won't buy it. it ain't like CRPG fans are spoiled for choice right now.

yeah, we already knew DA would be out by April 09. we don't yet know when D3 will be released.

hell, it's about time someone put those sad forums out of their misery: year after year of folk debating the barest sketches of info, endlessly speculating what the game might be like based on the most minimal of throwaway comments by developers and otherwise sucking Bio's big fat one. Blizzard's announcement is clearly a kick in the pants for Bio, though. Diablo 3 may be over a year from release but we already have gameplay videos, world maps, character profiles, etc. DA, by contrast, was announced four frakking years ago and so far we've seen buttkiss. At last Bio are pulling finger.

i look forward to playing this obsessively for about 12 hours, just like i did with Diablo 2, Dungeon Seige and Titan Quest. and then giving up cold turkey once i realise its just the same damn thing over and over, except in a variety of different locations.

i'm sure that Wizards would love to parley D&D into a profitable MMO but, man, how boring would that be?

I enjoyed Farcry more and Crysis a lot less. Farcry was simple. Run around cool island maps with guns and shoot things. It had a plot of some kind that i don't really remember, but the jungle settings were always fun. Crysis was the same in a lot of ways except somehow much less fun and far more boring. Maybe it was just because it was more of the same (plus a supersuit) or maybe because my otherwise respectable computer was only able to run the graphics on medium and on medium, Crysis is not an amazingly-looking state-of-the-art game, it is simply okay but nothing special. Reading the reviews of Crysis, it's hard to see what all the fuss was about (quite literally). It only confirms my opinion that most professional games reviewers are shills and idiots. Although it's no doubt hard for a developer to put so much into a game with such cutting-edge graphics only to see sales collapse due to piracy and what not, i'd have a lot more sympathy but for the fact that i forked out hard-earned cash on what for me was a very average-looking game that was in most other respectives deeply meh.

i don't really mind anti-piracy measures in and of themselves: publishers are entitled to be antsy about protecting a product that's 100% digital &, while i understand that others have had serious problems with securerom, i've never encountered any problems with this myself. what i find laughable are the endless rounds of delay caused to poor Ossian and Obsidian by Atari's insistence upon its new anti-piracy measures: we were originally told MoW would be within weeks of thanksgiving, then christmas, then early 2008, then until the next patch, then the next patch AFTER that, then as part of the Gold edition release, then AFTER that, etc, etc. it's now June, for frak's sake, Gold has gone gold and is on the streets, and there's still no word when MoW will be available. like i say, Atari are entitled to protect their product from being pirated, but it surely reaches a point where they loose all goodwill with customers for doing so. maybe this just shows that goodwill counts for very little: CRPGs are a market in which everyone who would have bought MOW last thanksgiving will most likely buy it in July or September or whenever it comes out. but it's still a frakking shyte state of affairs.

I look forward to games localized to south east london: dark, violent and everyone has bad teeth. not lewisham or bermondsey, mind. the game players there are a bunch of wankers.

Because different markets have vastly different expectations in terms of visual aesthetics. Localization doesn't just apply to the translation of text. isn't it a little late for april fools?. i'm in the UK but don't recall anyone asking me whether i liked my video games bright & shiny or dark & gritty. nor would i want the look of my game to be determined by the tastes of the french or the italians. i agree with Morgoth, this sounds retarded.

turn-based CRPGs stage a come-back! woo-hoo! oh, wait.

gnomes weren't in Tolkien and Tolkien = fantasy, ergo gnomes aren't 'fantasy staples'? i guess it beats 'Socrates is a fish' in the inane syllogism stakes. seriously, i'm no giant fan of gnomes as a playable race but you'd have to be pretty hard pressed to argue that they aren't a major part of northern european folklore going back to the middle ages.

despite all appearances to the contrary... no, an action RPG is a CRPG in which action is the dominating feature of the game. I said the feel of the game overall, not the feel of the combat. Witcher and BG have very different combat mechanisms, but the overall feel of the games (i.e. story-driven) are far more alike than, say, Witcher and Dungeon Seige or Witcher and Oblivion. No, it doesn't. An action RPG like Titan Quest is one-click=one-swing-of-your-weapon. Even Oblivion (which isn't an action RPG imo) is one-click=one-swing-of-your-weapon. Combat in the Witcher is one click to start a series of attacks, sit back and watch, wait for the light to start the next sequence of attacks, then click again. why? and according to whom? some internet nerd subcommittee? or is the OED now accepting submissions on classifying CRPGs? to most reasonable people, an 'action RPG' sensibly describes CRPGs like Diablo and Titan Quest, CRPGs with utterly minimal story and maximal combat and treasure, whose only RPG elements are stats and levelling up. it's perfectly reasonable to come up with terms to differentiate between combat mechanics that are more tactical and those that are more twitch-based. But it becomes silly to apply those terms to the genre of game. Except if you happen to think definining the Witcher in terms of its combat mechanism is the height of frakking stupidity. In which case, it's kinda relevant.

sure. chess is a little dry for my tastes, anything to make it more interesting would be good.

I've never read such a literate yet negative review of the Witcher. Kudos, sir, kudos - a singular acheivement. I'm sorry, btw, that you found the sideplots so unengaging and the payoff for some of your decisions so distant. The Witcher ain't

thanks, that's a very simple and clear definition and one i can see would lead some people to classify the Witcher as an action RPG. it is also unbelievably silly, focusing on a single criterion to the exclusion of all else. but, since we're engaged in rigid formalism, then it's worth pointing out that it's wrong, at least as it applies to the Witcher. Default attacks in the Witcher aren't determined by each individual click, rather each click represents a different stage in an attack sequence. unusually, the timing of clicks at each stage matters, but it is much closer in feel to BG than any action RPG. interestingly, IIRC the combat in Dungeon Seige was click-to-target instead of each-swing-is-a-hit. it would be consistent with its dumbness, that according to that definition, Dungeon Seige (a game with nothing but combat) is not an action RPG but the Witcher is. of course, a proper definition of an action RPG would have to be concerned with the content and substance of the game, not just the dynamics of combat. by that measure, a story-driven game like Witcher is much closer to BG or Planescape than a simple kill monster-collect treasure game like Titan Quest or Diablo. instead, that definition reminds me of the nutters over at RPG Codex who don't believe an RPG is an RPG unless it's turn-based.

i'm curious, just how did the Witcher become known as an 'action' RPG? i'm sure folk can quibble over categorization but, in my book, action RPGs are games like Diablo or Titan Quest. Nobody who gets past its prologue could confuse those games with the Witcher. then again, Gromnir and i move in different circles. i'm sure the folk he knows are a rarified bunch. p.s. once i tweaked the graphics settings, Witcher ran far more smoothly on my PC than NWN2. it looked much better and had quicker load times too.

you protest too much, corporate lackey! how many pieces of silver did you earn from your dark masters in Renton, WA for such snivelling, dissembling prose? do they pay you by the word or by the CTR?

it's worth noting that, in the 1e DMG, all the rules for aerial combat used hex maps. okay, maybe it's not actually worth noting, but i find it interesting. fortunately the issue of squares v hexes, 2d v 3d will become irrelevant by the time 5e rolls around. by that time, GoogleTimeWarner will just beam the gamegrid directly into our neural ports.

he's gone to that great, outer plane in the sky. he was like the George Lucas of the RPG genre. or the Yoda. RIP, sir, RIP.

what do i know about Mysteries of Westgate? not the release date, that's for sure.

as they say at AICN, the article is ... a little leafy. me, i go for facts, not opinions.