Yeah, I'm getting in a 1/2 hour at a time with Skyrim, really loving it...took a bit to get used to the skill system. Love the crafting.
I'm playing mage style, healing in one hand, blasty in the otherQuite efficent so far. And now that I have a bodyguard (playing the story for a little bit gets you one) I feel a lot better off. (And you can access their inventory and make em carry stuff!)
Brevior saltare cum deformibus viris est vita
Ooh I've not been bothering with the companions - I found they got in the way of my swinging sword and annoyed me. But if they can carrry stuff ...
Played up to level 10 with a warrior/mage mish-mash, realised a mish-mash wasn't as good as either/or, so re-rolled a mage. Got up to level 5 and missed swinging swords about, so re-rolled again as Mr Muscles with a hideously tepid IQ but fine pecs and a big sword, and I'm enjoying.
Has anyone noticed how most of the guards sound just like Arnie Schwartzenegger?
All this talk makes me want to look into this game.....
Bleh. Right now I'm a level 23 warrior/mage/thief/crafter mish-mash. It's working alright.Originally Posted by Timbuk2
Guards from certain cities definitely make me think of Arnie every time they speak.
Anyone else finding it kinda souless and poorly written, or just me? Good graphics, interesting gameplay, but the story and writing and NPC interactions seem really hollow and crappy, like they're basically slapped on as an afterthought... or just me?
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson: American Founding Father, clairvoyant and seditious traitor.
I always wondered why top RPGs couldn't outsource their story-telling to some poor literature/English grad students. They'd do the work for peanuts and create something that isn't full of cliches.
Hope is the denial of reality
Magnets.
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
It's definitely not written by Bioware. Some of the voice acting is distractingly bad, but the writing hasn't bothered me too much. I'm not really playing it for the story, though.
It also wouldn't be that good. Lit/English students mostly don't learn creative writing, they learn deconstruction.
Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"
Think Elder Scrolls stories have been more about you, the character, and their focus is more about little snippets to flesh out what you're doing, rather than creating a narrative. (things like the in-game books, for example)
And, yeah their narratives are pretty dry when they do have them, like the start of the game.
Bioware does that better, but it's the unscripted moments I'll remember when thinking about my story in Skyrim.
(Like the dragon last night who got his ass whooped by a Mammoth.)
At the very least, they'd know a terrible story when they see one.
Hope is the denial of reality
Just started (finally) Empire Total War. So far seems interesting, but it's taking ~5 min it seems between turns for AI nations.
Pirates have destroyed most of my fleet in the Americas already, can't upgrade buildings without research, but may pick a war with the natives.
You should take a look at the DarthMod for Empire, Rand.
It really enhances the game a ton.
I wish my computer could run TW games these days. It can't even handle Rome.
I have a hard time believing the Bethseda hacks don't know that already. More likely explanation is that they just don't give a shit. (And since they keep making huge piles of cash on their really shitty engine and purty graphics, why should they, I guess.)
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson: American Founding Father, clairvoyant and seditious traitor.
The NPCs are designed for unlimited quests. Not sure how a robust story line would work with that.
"In a field where an overlooked bug could cost millions, you want people who will speak their minds, even if they’re sometimes obnoxious about it."
I played the Tintin game - it's quite entertaining, well made, but a bit too easy. Looks pretty though!
Keep on keepin' the beat alive!
Yah, eet iz troo.Has anyone noticed how most of the guards sound just like Arnie Schwartzenegger?
It's more like a combo of a big-boned Viking woman combined with Arnold, though...
Yeah, they obviously learned their lesson there. I didn't like the level scaling either.
A lot of the stuff feels rushed (gaining Smithing levels, for instance [will let you guys figure it out the very plain mechanism actually, in hindsight, don't want to add spoilers here], and way less on the grind stone... or Speech exp, where you only get exp for the first item of its type on every trade [besides that, exp still depends on gold amount])....
And of course, the PC port was sub-par; it's like they didn't even beta-test it.
A lot of the quests are quite dry and option-less and there are lots of little and big bugs -- too many to name, but the game overall is still very fun.
Agreed...
Last edited by agamemnus; 11-16-2011 at 06:25 AM.
Just saw an ad for this thing:
http://pc.ign.com/articles/121/1211333p1.html
It actually looks pretty good. The release date is inconvieniently close to Mass Effect 3's, but it's still good to know that there'll be a place to go to once I run out of Skyrim.
Looks good, but I really wish the new RPGs would allow more for strategy instead of relying on instant responses that force you to do moves that are easily executable, instead of the ones more suitable for a given situation.
Hope is the denial of reality
Alas, old-school RPGs are dead. Died out with Sir-Tech.
Not sure how seriously to take that article, or even how much to believe with the guy's repeated references to Fallout 3, as if it was an RPG or even a good game.Still, probably worth a look for how little there is in the way of anythign even resembling an RPG these days.
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson: American Founding Father, clairvoyant and seditious traitor.
I did wonder at which point adventure games that allowed you to accumulate loot started being called RPGs...
Hope is the denial of reality
I'm sure it was Clinton's fault somehow.
That's about when it happened, right?
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
They were called action-RPGs for a long time. Then standard RPGs stopped getting made. At some point they took over the name.
Adventure games are something else (King's Quest, Zork, and the like) and on life-support. I'd call it completely dead, but there we still seem to get a trickle of low budget games in the genre.
There has been a distinction between wrpgs anf jrpgs for quite a while.
"In a field where an overlooked bug could cost millions, you want people who will speak their minds, even if they’re sometimes obnoxious about it."
Only because the western equivalent (on which the jrpgs were made) died off a decade ago.
Hope is the denial of reality
I'd say that as a whole the classic adventure games are dead. I've not seen anything of the like in a serious fashion in a long time.
I'd have guessed in the 1970s with the release of Dungeon & Dragons. Maybe older though.
There was a Monkey Island remake. Haven't seen anything since, but I thought it was a good nod in adventure games' direction.
I've got that. Just goes to show though, from 1990-2000 there were 4 great Monkey Island games, as well as the series of Kings Quest, Space Quest, Quest for Glory, Indiana Jones etc, etc, etc
Since then we've had one Monkey Island game in the last 11 years, and 2 remakes of the originals. Yaay.
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