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MrBrown

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Posts posted by MrBrown

  1. Sign me up for the charts, too.

     

    If the game doesn't tell them to me, I'll read about them online anyway. It's just annoying when I have to read the workings of the game somewhere else than the product itself.

     

     

    I remember when, during the development of Lionheart, this was requested, and the lead developers said "players actually want to know that stuff?". I'd be really surprised if some people at bioware wouldn't have figured it out by now after N games.

  2. I find it funny that Hawke doesn't think it's necessary to wash his face before laying with somebody he presumably cares for.

     

    Or he just hit her a bit too hard.

     

    Now, let us contemplate what the blood on female Hawke's face is.

  3. ignoring for a moment that ea don't own minsc and boo, am curious to hear what peoples thinks would be the relative costs to add unlockable characters (with dedicated vo resources) versus adding some goofy armour.

     

    On a somewhat related note, I always thought a good DLC for ME1 or 2 would have been to add another voice set for Shepard.

  4. What was bad about Leliana's Song?

     

    What Azure79 said. I guess the quest itself wasn't that bad, but changing something that was supposed to have happened in a previously unvisited area to 100% reused areas was really offending, IMO.

  5. For the DAO DLC, without counting the one that just give items I've found the Stone Prisoner mediocre, the Wrden's keep and Return to Ostagar poor and I've not tried the other ones but I've heard they weren't better if not poorer.

     

    Definitely poorer. Leliana's Song and Witch Hunt are ridiculously bad. For Bioware's DLCs, I think the ME2 ones are generally a lot better than the DA:O ones.

  6. If this DLC policy continues, I won't ever buy a BioWare game on release anymore but just wait for a GOTY edition containing all extra content. Is there already such a version for DA:O, btw?

     

    Yes, the Ultimate Edition.

     

    And yeah, that's pretty much my policy as well.

  7. Ah, clever. If I understood that correctly, you can't get 3 mage party anymore? It seriously help the balance as it's unlikely that basic root / AoE routine + tank / nuke / heal haven't gone away.

     

     

    Supposedly there's at least 2 companions of each class, + Hawke, so you can have 3 of any class I think. They might add more in DLCs of course, like they did with Sebastion.

  8. I never saw much reason to play NWN as anything other than high damage melee fighter. They can just whack their way through anything. The only problems are instances where you fail a will save, but that isn't a big problem.

     

    I don't remember the details of my build, but it was basically a Fighter/Weaponmaster. If you can really crunch the numbers, you can also throw in that Disciple of Tor prestige class, or whatever it was called.

  9. On the bio boards, it took the first thread of this video about 10 post to note the boobs. Then it was all about that.

     

    The Bio people say her breasts aren't supposed to look big though, it just looks like that in the screencap for some reason.

     

     

    EDIT:

     

     

    Apparently the Aerie/Na'vi clone is supposed to be the mage apprentice from the Dalish origin. I didn't even recognize her.

     

    Might be the new look of the elves.

  10. I don't particularly care about dual-wielding as such, as long as there are other meaningful choices. Complaining about dual-wielding is like complaining about Torment not having swords; it might have become an industry standard to include it, but when you get down to it, it's just one choice you can have, and the important thing is that you have meaningful stuff to choose from, not what those choices are.

     

    That said, while DA:O had quite alot of talents for all styles, the problem was that many of those were bugged or badly designed. I wouldn't mind it if there were less talents, if they're more useful and fun to play with now.

  11. Of course I also think the Wardens and the Darkspawn are the lamest part of the DA universe, so having an entire game set around that stuff didn't help me much.

     

    On that note, has Bioware said how much stuff DA2 is going have about wardens or the darkspawn? I've seen no detailed info.

  12. btw, I don't really remember how aggro worked in DAO, but what was so different about it, other than the prioritisation system discussed, from previous single player RPGs? How is WOW-style aggro different from, say, IE-style?

     

     

    The main difference was abilities (about 4 in DA:O iirc, more in Awakening) that directly influenced threat-ratings, thus making enemies choose specific characters over others as targets. The gameplay idea is that you can in this way direct enemies to attack characters that can more easily shake off the attacks (the tanks) rather than the weaker ones.

     

    The bigger issue is that, if you have no way to control which enemies attack what character, that means you are encouraged to make characters with similar ability to soak damage. And this takes away from the variance of characters design, as you encouraged to design characters the same way, at least in this aspect.

     

    I can think of 3 ways to solve this:

    1) Make stupid AI, that attacks the first enemy it sees, so players can solve this with easy positioning. I think the IE games had a lot of stupid AI like this, but there was several exceptions as well, even within a specific game I think.

    2) Make combatant positioning count so that enemies can't attack any characters they see freely. The attacks of opportunity used NWN is one example, though I don't think it worked at all (it works fine in PnP).

    3) Give the player abilities to influence what enemies attack directly. I'm not sure if WoW was the first one to do this, but it's probably the most famous.

  13. Just commenting on stuff mentioned in the last few pages.

     

     

    I think WoW-style aggro-management is Teh Future for RPGs with real-time combat. It just brings a wealth of tactical options games like the IE or NWN games didn't have. Certainly, it's not very realistic, but RPGs tend to be so abstracted anyway, I'm surprised people have a problem with this at all.

     

    Now, in turn-based combat, something like the positioning of combatants would work, but I doubt it'd work in games with real-time combat. Especially if the player is expected to control all the characters.

     

     

     

    As for DA:O, it was a mess. Half the abilities were bugged or didn't work the way the game said they would, and the most effective builds were often very counterintuitive. Awakening fixed some things, but also created more weird stuff. I kinda hope Bioware has cut the amount of abilities, since they seem to be unable to QA the amount DA:O had. I'd really prefer to learn to play the game by playing the game, not by reading about the actual workings online.

  14. I haven't followed DA2 that closely so far, so this might be an old question, but is DA2 going to have the same general control scheme as DA1? That is, you control 1 party member always, the rest follow their scripts, but you can switch anytime?

  15. I'm not bashing EmoWare in this post, it's a serious question.

     

    Which is: Have CRPGs become too NPC-centric?

     

    Of course NPCs are an important part of the game, but FFS the amount of effort that goes into them, for me, has outweighed their overall significance. I know a few folks here look down on old-skool values like exploration, fighting in tunnels, fun, humour and all the rest of the things that make games worth playing in the first place, but isn't the current NPC paradigm akin to the tail wagging the dog?

     

    Frankly (done really well), a bit of dialogue, a side quest here and there and maybe a special item or two is more than enough NPC input for me.

     

    As I see it, it's the want to create a story. And a story needs characters. And if the player determines stuff about the main character, the developers can't touch it too much; so, to create a story, they need strong NPCs.

     

    It seems to be working too. It seems alot of people are willing to sacrifice some of these old-skool values of yours for that.

  16. Frankly, if they want to make a more story-focused game, I'd prefer they use a predetermined main character.

     

    The more choice you give to the player about the main character, the more you have to either a) change the focus of the story away from the "main" character, which results in him/her becoming a sort of observer who goes to places to find out the stories, rather than the stories revolving around him/her, or b) make game content that is exclusive of each other, which they always want to minimize because it means they'll be putting work into content that will only be used by a some of the players.

  17. I think I read somewhere that you could just pick it up (Z button) and drag it to somewhere out of the eyes of the Rangers and then steal it. It's still stealing but you avoid the "Stop, you criminal scum!" scenario.

     

    You can steal anything in the game this way. You still get negative karma, but no one gets hostile. It's useful for getting limited stuff like books, or getting money early on.

  18. I'm lv 18 and I've got energy, speech, lockpick, explosives, sneak and science all well past 75. That would have been impossible with my old char. Time to start upping guns, and that will be it for skills i can actually use. I can get to 50 repair with meds so that takes care of repair kits.

    There may be a design flaw with energy weapons. I haven't been following it close, but these guys have...

     

     

    That's interesting. I wonder how that'll turn out in future patches.

     

    Not that it matters much gameplay-wise, Plasma Caster and the YCS/186 still kill everything so fast it's a joke.

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