themadhatter114

I'm hearing from Sega that the console versions will not have DRM, so I think I'll be heading in that direction.

? How did the PC/360/PS3 version "ruin" the gameplay? Eh, I suppose I'm exaggerating. I'm not saying that I didn't like the 360 version. I certainly played through it. But the stealth in it sucks compared to the previous games. You have a little light on your back that tells you if you are safe or not, and you are apparently safe in just about any shadow even if it's clearly not very dark. The sliding light meter was a lot more informative than the stupid red light/green light system. I just didn't like it nearly as much primarily for those reasons. I LOVED the idea of the trust meter, the key choices, and the multiple endings, though. However, I am probably still a little bitter about the choice you have to make regarding Lambert...also from what I've read they expand upon the plot in the X-Box version way more, especially the relationship between Sam and Enrica. I honestly still need to pick up the X-Box version, but I just think that Chaos Theory had much better gameplay mechanics than Next-Gen DA. And I think the Montreal team's work is consistently better than the Shanghai team's. Also, the mission where you have to bug a meeting, and then go kill/save Hisham, just didn't feel right. It felt more like an action game. Sam Fisher feels a lot less believable when he's running through battlefields in the day-time.

But so long as his reactions are realistic, we don't need to give him emotional issues just to make him seem human. Simply showing anger every now and then would be fine with me. Or passionately disagreeable. For instance, when one of these crazy girls wants us to assassinate somebody, it would be nice if we can decline that request rather aggressively. Any sort of realistic sounding responses whenever he's asked to kill someone. Arguing with people a little bit. I don't really need a lot of deep emotional stuff when I'm playing a game. Make it intriguing and give us hard decisions, but don't try to force us into emotional scenes. But, I don't know, there could be stuff where we're asked to assassinate characters that we've been interacting with. You could find out that you need to kill one of your girlfriends. Just give us reason to think about certain decisions, at least for a moment. With the timed response system I assume we're going to have to keep our allegiances in mind at all time because we could be asked to kill someone we trust all of a sudden and have to give a yes or no within 5 seconds. I think Splinter Cell: Double Agent did a decent job of making a few of the decisions pretty hard to make, even if the 360 version did ruin the gameplay of the previous games. There were really only 3 decisions that ultimately mattered (as well as your trust meter), but the decision of whether or not to blow up some innocent people, and whether or not to frame the one person that you're getting close to, and then the decision whether or not to kill to keep from blowing your cover was certainly not an easy one. And the game had 3 different endings based on those 3 decisions and your trust meter.

Yeah, I'd definitely let an optional game component affect my perspective on how the rest of the game will play. In what way did you think that this would be the spiritual successor to Deus Ex? And in what way does the option of bagging chicks make it no longer a possible spiritual successor to Deus Ex? Did you think it was going to be some big futuristic conspiracy-fest with the Illuminati and the Knights Templar? Or did you think it would be an atmospheric shooter with varying viable playstyles, with a skill system similar to Deus Ex, with a strong plot, but with more dialogue, more choices, more consequences? Either way, what does this preview change?

What happened to make Thorton cry? Was he watching The Secret of NIMH?

I don't want to see a seen of Thorton crying. I mean, you can put good scenes into the game without turning him into a sobbing schoolgirl. And, honestly, a macho man simply doesn't cry. He has 2 emotions: happy and mad. Every negative emotion manifests itself in varying degrees of anger. Empathy doesn't go beyond "Wow, I'm sorry to hear that. That sucks." I don't expect Thorton to be sitting around listening to people's sob stories, either. I'm not against having some emotionally powerful scenes; I'm all for them. But that doesn't mean Thorton needs to break down in the face of them. Any sympathetic responses should be written and delivered in a manly way. I could've done without the poor delivery of a lot of the sympathetic lines in Mass Effect. Shepard simply sounded like a douchebag when he was trying to sympathize with people. And thought-provoking scenes are just as good as emotional ones, and I expect a wealth of those.

What are alignments good for, anyway? Anyone serious about role-playing can create various factions that oppose each other for various reasons without focusing too much on alignment. Some people just want to kill bad guys. I think removing it from game mechanics is a good move.

No one cares if you played a game for 100 hours, that doesn't make it any more valid than anyone else's game time. Your personal play times don't negate the fact that Jade Empire and Mass Effect are easily doable in under 20 hours.

I call bull****. NWN2 was many things, but short it aint Since when is 20 hours short when you are skipping through all the cut-scenes and dialogues and know exactly what to do for every quest? Especially once you know that the outcome of the trial is completely irrelevant, thus you can skip all the fact-finding? Sure, I probably spent 60 or so hours the first playthrough. But playing again with another good character doesn't take very long. Heck, I probably put 30 hours or so into MotB, and then realized on another playthrough that I could play through it in about 8 if I didn't do any sidequests. You can't call a game short just because someone can beat it quickly if they try hard enough. Check out some sites for speed runs of different games. Fallout it under 10 minutes. Torment in 1 hour. I don't see what the big deal is in saying that you could finish NWN2 in 20 if you tried.

Eh, I can't find anything now. Could have been a different game. But I vaguely remember an interview with some European site where Feargus said NWN2's campaign would be 20 hours, which brought ridicule at the Codex and then backtracking by the devs. However, 20 hours is probably about right if you click through all the dialogues, know exactly what to do, and rush through the game.

Which is what annoys me quite a bit about several D&D games where you have a main character. It's ridiculous if I have a stealth character that gets pulled into conversation before major combats. Or avoiding enemies and losing out on XP, etc. It's annoying. However, you could balance something like that by making stealth viable without tons of XP (for example if you could play the entirety of Alpha Protocol as a Splinter Cell game without having to level up any sort of stealth skill). However, considering that you will almost certainly need high skill levels in hacking, electronics, lock-picking, and gadgetry for a fully optimized stealth build. However, I don't expect to be able to avoid combat entirely. I'm sure that some guys that we have to talk to will be held hostage, or have guards of their own. Perhaps we'll be able to sneak into the final room, but then need a silenced chain-shot to take out the guards in the room and talk to the guy before sneaking out the window. Take Fallout, for example, you don't need exorbitant skill levels to complete the main quests, and if you grind for XP, you're likely to miss out on some of the better endings. And if you want to go crazy and kill everything, all those hitpoints and bonuses to hit with your chosen weapon are vital. So I don't see any need to balance the XP gain, so long as you balance the XP gain with the XP need. A stealthy D&D character has to up the hide & move silently skills, or just the move silently skill and get a longer duration for a racial invisibility spell. So in that system you really need to simply balance XP for all playstyles.

Was Deus Ex much longer? Maybe 30 hours? I never finished it so I wouldn't know, though I've often considered finding another copy. But, anyway. Take a typical RPG. Now make it a shooter so that enemies go down in just a couple hits and you don't have drawn out combats with people missing and having tons of hitpoints, etc. Take out the reading of dialogue and make everything voiced with responses put on a timer. Take out waves of enemies and grinding for XP. Make it for just a single character and make leveling up a straightforward, quick thing to do. Take away all the filler content like sidequests that have nothing to do with the main story, and replace that with some stuff like optional secondary objectives, some optional missions that play into the storyline, and conflicting objectives for different factions. Then perhaps base your play-time on a gung-ho character who kills everything in sight and doesn't take the time to sneak, hack things, or explore, and who mainly just completes primary objectives. Now say that took 20 hours. What you're left with is a gameplay experience that is at least twice as long as most shooters with most of the depth of a longer RPG condensed into more fast-paced responsive gameplay. I'm all for it. And I think NWN2 was once quoted as being a 20-hour campaign, which it only is if you're not reading dialogue, skipping cut-scenes, and not being meticulous about finding everything and completing sidequests. So maybe on a second run through. Unlike Bethesda, which promises 100 hours of gameplay for every game they release, despite the main quest taking 10 hours or so, the times that Obsidian gives seem to always be on the low side.

Actually, I simply assumed that there wouldn't be XP for kills without realizing that they've not said that anywhere. XP for kills doesn't seem to fit the game. I think in Deus Ex you only got skill points for completing objectives, as in Bloodlines. I thought the XP for kills in Mass Effect was stupid, but really the skills in Mass Effect were all about different ways to kill things, anyhow. I really, really hope we have a Bloodlines/Deus Ex style skill system, but perhaps without escalating costs for increasing skills. I would prefer that the game give incentives to specialize and less incentive to try to become a jack of all trades. You have enough incentive to try to increase every skill without the disincentive to specialize. I'm pretty sure that in Deus Ex that upgrading from Advanced to Master isn't really worth it at all for most of the skills. I absolutely want stealth/combat/persuade to all be fully supported and viable. I'd even love to have non-combat quest solutions that depend on your combat skills (probably would work best with something like an explosives skill that is mainly used throughout the game to set high-powered explosives, but is occasionally used for defusing bombs, and if you don't have a high enough skill, your only option is to get the hell out, leaving some people to die). And from the mention of the "Any Last Words" perk, it sounds like you might get something like huge bonuses to intimidation if you have a reputation for offing people. Which would be awesome. I'd love to have no dialogue skills and merely have success dependent entirely on your reputation (something that I think would have been a lot more fun in Mass Effect...).

Why should you get rewarded XP for being stealthy? If a game takes out the mechanic of giving XP for kills, isn't that enough? I simply don't want the game to push me toward any type of gameplay. I want XP for completing objectives. And I want faction-based incentives depending on how I completed the mission. Killed everyone? Some faction loves that. Talked your way through? Some faction loves that. Didn't alert anyone to your presence? Some other faction loves that. But isn't the avoidance of gunfire enough of a reward, once you remove all the disincentives like all that XP you miss out on in D&D games?

I think that if just a few games were added to the list it could have precluded the "level up your guy" definition. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas would absolutely qualify and it could be argued that the recent NCAA Football and Madden games are, too (especially because of the "Camus Legend" mode on NCAA and the "Superstar" mode on Madden). Are there absolutely no games that are marketed as RPG's but that are completely devoid of skill/attribute increases? Something more like an adventure game, but with perhaps different starting attributed depending on background, a non-linear storyline, multiple endings, and heavy choice & consequences. For instance, if I'm playing Mass Effect with a level 60 character (since it's level-scaled it doesn't at all feel like cheating, and it's way more fun in my opinion), is it no longer an RPG? Or playing any RPG with a maxed out character (which is just boring and game-breaking if there's no level-scaling)?

Yes, it looks like there will be 5 combat skills, plus hacking, lock-picking, some sort of toughness skill. So at minimum there are 8 skills that are set in stone. That leaves at most 2 skills, and I think you've probably picked the right two. However, I wouldn't be surprised if electronics is incorporated into hacking. If Deus Ex is any indication it won't be. But also notice that he doesn't say that gadget use is governed by skills, while he does specifically say that there are separate skills for all 4 shooting weapons and for close combat. There's also possibly 1 speech skill, and maybe some sort of skill-based stealth system. But I don't expect the dialogue or the stealth to be skill-dependent. Is there anything left? I suppose it could ultimately any 2 among those last 4, or something else that I didn't mention.

Will this game use light and shadows to give a stealth feel reminiscent of Splinter Cell, or only noise and line-of-sight? I really hope we'll be able to do things like shoot out/turn off lights and quietly walk past people that are unknowingly looking right at us. I love in Splinter Cell when you can flip a switch, take a few steps back, and then grab the guy who comes to flip the light back on, knock him out and hide his body in a dark corner of an adjacent room. One thing that was amusing in Splinter Cell, though, was that it seemed like there were places that remained pitch black 24 hours a day no matter how many lights were on, and that by shooting out a single light you could create a little circle of blackness. So I'd love use of light and shadows, but not complete dependency on it so that we can sometimes just avoid line of sight, pick locks and find alternate pathways, turn off cameras, etc.

I have been scoping around for some news about this game and there are a lot of random gaming sites throwing up previews of this and they can't stop mentioning Mass Effect. It's like Mass Effect is the only game they've ever played. "3rd person RPG, Unreal 3.0, aha Mass Effect 2!" "Bioware junior makes another sequel but with spies!" "Cinematic dialogue and similar fonts, zomg Mass Effect!" Apparently this game looks exactly like Mass Effect, right down to the stealth, jumping, zip-lining, and close-quarters combat. But then there are actually lots of posts in the comments sections that say stuff like: "Wow, you mentioned this game and Mass Effect in the same sentence! Must buy!" I mean, geesh, Mass Effect was pretty good, but there were a ton of things they could have done a whole lot better. And I really don't expect the things that I very much didn't like from Mass Effect (a bad and story-wise out of place exploration system, terrible loot system, level scaling, having humanity's last, best hope start out very weak) to be an issue or as much of an issue in Alpha Protocol. Do these gaming sites think that Oblivion and Mass Effect are the only RPGs ever, so every game must be compared to them even if, beyond some standard RPG fare, there is little in common?

When will the title of the next project be announced?

Mild Spoiler Ahead... In the "Italian Dinner" quest, you can learn from Christopher Giovanni that he's actually not a member of the Giovanni family, and that his mother cheated on her husband with a man named Michael Avellone. This would make Christopher Giovanni's proper name Christopher Avellone. Intentional? A nod to MCA or a subtle insult to his mother?

American football is the best game ever because it's physical and it's way more tactical than any other game. Baseball is probably next in awesomeness because of the pacing and tactical element. Basketball is okay but the college game is way more interesting than the pro game.

Political Compass: 3.25 Economic, -.36 Social OK Cupid: Social 60% Permissive, Economic 81% Permissive, right between Donald Trump and Ted Nugent.

What I don't understand is, if we're replacing the old ones...shouldn't we just go ahead and use them? What better way to ensure that no one steals them?

Human beings are the source of the world's problems. They just use religion as an excuse to treat each other like crap. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Of course, and if they couldn't use religion as an excuse, they'd find something else.

Which reminds me of a discussion I had when at work one time. Somehow it came up that I didn't particularly care for lesbianism (in that I didn't find it particularly attractive). This shocked some guys (most in fact....I seemed to be explaining myself to almost everyone at work that day). I commented that I've seen not-so-hot lesbians making out, and it didn't exactly "thrill" me. I don't know how representative my little Boston Pizza kitchen was of the rest of the world, but it was 8 men against 1 man, and those 8 men believed lesbians were hot regardless, and that my comments about unattractive lesbians shouldn't be relevant. Yeah, hot lesbians in porn are hot....but hot women doing anything can be hot <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Yeah, I'm all for hot lesbians in porn, but nothing's a bigger turnoff than sitting around campus with my wife and seeing two 300-pound women making out in public. Not that I'm particularly fond of seeing anybody making out in public (in fact I find it rather disgusting to see people even being affectionate in public...I think I'm just disgusted by happy people in general despite being one myself, and I'm not exactly cold to my wife in public, either).