TheMightyEthan

The worst part about the DKR name reveal

Are you sure that's not an 80's metal band album cover?

Damnit, I was gonna say that!

StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm campaign. Really enjoyed it.

Yeah, I tend to take an approach like the US at the beginning of WWII: not much of a standing army, but if I get attacked my entire industrial machine switches to military production. It works better against computers than humans though.

No, must have missed those.

I was involved in one game that kinda petered out just cause it was taking so long.

Wow, I hadn't realized that just last year they were saying it wouldn't be online-only. Kind of destroys the whole "it's been central to the game design from the beginning" argument.

Epic pace is the way to go.

Maybe I read too much into it, but it seemed to me like you were saying I believe all that stuff I said just because everyone else does.

Man you really should. Gods & Kings is great.

And if you're actually not an asshole you can go beyond assuming people are sheep just because they disagree with you.

Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm. Goddamn I love Starcraft.

I didn't watch that video (because it's 11 minutes long), but pretty much the only complains I've heard are 1) online-only, 2) bad pathfinding (which they claim to be working on), and 3) small city size. I mean, I've heard about some other problems with the simulation, but they all seem to stem out of the bad pathfinding (all emergency services responding to the same emergency, all sims in a neighborhood walking to the same job, etc).

So EA removed the discussion about the offline mode from their forums, because it's a "hack", not a "mod". Thing is, for it to be a "hack" don't they have to admit that the online requirement is a security measure rather than a game design decision, thus torpedoing their entire approach to the subject so far?

lol, okay, I think we're talking past each other. I said if your character had a skill for Spanish it would make sense that the higher the skill the better the translation, but I didn't necessarily mean that your character should have a skill for Spanish. Although upgraded translators giving better translations makes sense too. Online translators now are a hell of a lot better than they were 10 years ago.

But there are plenty of things my characters do/know in RPGs that I can't/don't. Like magic, alchemy, whatever. That's the whole point of a skill system.

Part of the problem I thought with the Native American dialog in AC3 was that it always took the actors 10 times as long to say the line as it took me to read it, so I would read the line and then have to sit there waiting while they spoke a language that sounded like gibberish to me. I like that idea for when you're using a translator device, but if your character actually had a skill for "Spanish" or whatever it would make sense that the translation gets better as the skill rises.

They said that this is not that expansion (Enter the Dominatrix), this is it's own thing, though some aspects of EtD were incorporated into it. They said EtD is going to be released as DLC for this game.

August 20 in US. Looks like with the flying/super jumping stuff they might have added a little Crackdown or Prototype into it.

Here's the official page. New features: Revamped/beefed-up cultural victory Ideologies for your civ (Freedom, Order, or Autocracy) World Congress that will impose sanctions against rogue states, etc International trade routes 9 new civs 2 new scenarios

Wow, what? The reason people don't ask how long a movie is is because they don't need to ask; for the most part movies are fairly consistent length, in the neighborhood of 2 hours. If I went to the theater and bought a ticket expecting a full-length feature film and instead got something 45 minutes long I'd be pissed the same as if I bought a video game for 60 bucks and it was over in 4 hours. So the issue is perception and not if it's actually worth your money or not. Got it. What does that even mean? The only issue with any kind of consumer satisfaction is what they perceive. You're right, I will be unhappy if I perceive it to not be worth my money, because that's the only way to determine if it was worth my money. There's no objective way of determining that. That said, just saying I'll be pissed if the game is short and leaving it at that is an oversimplification. I liked Journey and it was short, but it also didn't cost $60. And obviously a bad game that's 70 hours long isn't worth anything to me, because it's a bad game. The question is how much enjoyment will I get for my money, and if I enjoy the experience of playing the game (as in the moment-to-moment gameplay) then making the game longer will add to the value of the game and making it shorter will detract. As dean likes to point out, people make a false dichotomy between short good games and long bad ones, as if those are the only options. Long good games do exist, and have more value (to me) than short good games, because I get more enjoyment out of them.

They just announced a new expansion, called Brave New World. It's major additions are trade routes and ideology. The thing about trade routes now being disruptable sounds both interesting and like it could be frustrating.

Yeah, that stadium one where they have the direct dirt road and then that big weird loop of thoroughfare way off to the side might be unique, but having a grid with the occasional wide road and mostly smaller ones it's just how you would expect people to design a city.

Wow, what? The reason people don't ask how long a movie is is because they don't need to ask; for the most part movies are fairly consistent length, in the neighborhood of 2 hours. If I went to the theater and bought a ticket expecting a full-length feature film and instead got something 45 minutes long I'd be pissed the same as if I bought a video game for 60 bucks and it was over in 4 hours.