That would be a rare feat lol. I don't even want to try to do the math on that probability. Maybe if you can ever get away from Mass Effect, you'll be able to get to KotOR again. Then maybe if you can ever get away from KotOR you can get back to Mass Effect again. It'll be an endless cycle!
I still haven't played Witcher 2 yet for my 360, but I will at some point. I'm planning on buying and playing Dragons Dogma Dark Arisen and Dragon Age Origins Ultimate first before anything. Witcher 3 will probably be amazing, anytime one of those games has come out it's been hailed as one of the finest RPGs of this generation. I can't remember anybody ever saying anything bad about those games.
Inquisition worries me more because of the reasons you listed. The story and lore in Thedas is what made Dragon Age 2 so special to me, and what sold me on the series. I like the tone of the story and the complexity of the factions. It's like A Song of Ice & Fire in the sense that it's high fantasy but the magic and fantasy parts take a backseat and the story, action, and drama is all about character development, personal relationships, world history, and politics. I want to see more drama and interesting characters develop in Thedas.
Very nice tribute. I could watch that gif all day long, it always makes me laugh, large sombrero yanked off to reveal a tiny sombrero lol. Ryan was one of the funniest and most genuine people I've ever seen in this industry. I grew to like everybody on the cast, Ryan, Jeff, Brad, Vinny, and Patrick all in their own ways. Ryan and Jeff probably brought the laughs hardest for me, but they took the cast in lots of directions and it wasn't always about laughs. Ryan really was a master at running the Bombcast ship every week, and he always brought a remarkable enthusiasm, positivity, humor, and insight. He really loved what he was doing and he loved the people he was doing it with, I will always remember him that way.
When I heard the DA people mention save importing it didn't make sense to me because the new game is coming out on next gen systems. The wikipedia says it's coming out on current gen as well, so they may be able to do more importing with that version of the game, but the next gen versions will probably just be picking pre built histories. I'm optimistic about Inquisition but the fact that they're trying to go for a Skyrim feel kind of worries me. Both Bioware and CdProjecktRed are pushing to make Dragon Age 3 and The Witcher 3 into a Skryim type of game and it's not that I doubt the studios skill and financial backing but even Bethesda spent like 5 years on Skyrim and the quality across the multiple platforms was inconsistent. And Bethesda has been doing this all their lives at that studio. Elder Scrolls is their greatest passion project and they spend half a decade making each one of those, and it's still messy out of the gate.
I just hope that Dragon Age and Witcher don't just go for broke on the Skyrim thing and end up with games that are stretched thin creatively and a technical mess. I love open world games, but pure scope is becoming less and less impressive to me over time. I really love what Johnathan Blow is doing with The Witness, he's been taking shots at other open world games as you'd probably expect him to do in the process, but he makes good points and I like his philosophy about making the world in The Witness as small as possible but as densely packed with interesting things as possible. In most open world games the novelty of the immense scale gets old pretty fast and most people end up using the fast travel systems anyways.
I'm not opposed to these games going full blown open world like Skyrim, but I just want them to realize you can make a game with diverse ecologies, weather, regions, and impressive spectacle without making the world the physical length and width of the world so huge.
When you watch people play open world games and they come across buildings you can't go into they often mention that they wish they could. When I listen to people as they experience these types of games they seem to not want things bigger, but more densely packed and interactive. People don't want more non-interactive space, unusable buildings, more sprawling mountain ranges and plains without too much to do, etc.
I think that the most compelling open world games will probably come from the indie space in the coming generation. Indies like open world designs too, but they don't have the budgets so they are most likely to do something like The Witness by changing the philosophy, less size but more interactivity and experimentation. Smaller stories with more options for personalization, smaller worlds with more interactivity.
One of my top 5 RPGs, I've never made an official list because I don't usually like lists but if I did this game would be on it. I'm quite nostalgic about this one and it's still the game I'd most like to see an HD remake of with smoother performance, less studdering, and new visuals.
My favorite part of the game was becoming a Jedi on Dantooine, it was very philosophical, it took a while to get an actual lightsaber, and they took great care to give you a certain tone, sense of place, and belief system of the different Jedis. When I learned about the different saber colors and got to pick my own and choose a class I felt like I was creating my own Jedi and contributing to the greater cause in my own way.
My favorite part of Dantooine was that mission where you do the murder investigation, I think the quest(s) were called Murdered Settler or Dead Settler. It was fantastic, it was the first time a game made me feel like Judge Judy and have it be a great thing. Being a Jedi you are very philosophical and peaceful and the way they gave you missions that let you intervene inbetween people's dramas was interesting.
I always start on Normal since that's the way they meant the game to be played by the majority of people. If it wasn't challenging enough then I bump up the difficulty on the next playthrough.
Halo games are the only ones where I start out on Heroic difficulty everytime. Bungie always said Heroic was the way Halo was meant to be played and it's a ton of fun, it's always perfectly balanced for me right inbetween Normal mode and Legendary mode. On Skyrim I started out on Apprentice difficulty but my character has gotten so strong that I'm now playing the game at Master difficulty and it's still not too difficult.
I like this album a lot, the only song I ended up not liking as much was Dead Mans Hand On You. Other than that I love all the other songs so I just end up listening through the whole album as I play games and I have it on repeat so it starts right over. The red and white snowy album cover is my favorite one since Hatebreeder and Follow the Reaper, it feels like a classic Bodom design again.
I've been listening to entirely too much of the band Battle Beast the past month or so. I listened to their album Steel for the first time and it blew me away. They have a classic heavy metal Judas Priest sound but they add in a solid punch of power metal lyrics, melodies, and choruses I guess. It just rocks, fantastic singer, keyboards, guitars, drums, and bass. There's some awesome metal anthems in this album. And the cover art is badass, it basically shows Robocop fighting a jungle cat man. I have 6 different favorite songs on the album so it's hard to pick, here's one of them.
I said on twitter that loosing Davis is pretty devastating, but it wakes me up and makes me more determined to start making these games. There's a lot of us at the site that are passionate about working in this industry and there's no better time than now to start fighting for it harder than ever. I've been in a rut for a little bit and having things like this happen puts things into context and reminds me I can't be in a rut forever, you never know how much time you have left. It's time to build some confidence, to make games and be happy and get over personal and financial hurdles.
I played the demo for this and really loved the art and music, but the mechanics kept tripping me up. There's a visual language to the puzzles I played that contrasts the logic I'd expect the game to have. When the tornado got introduced I couldn't get it to work consistently or maybe the game didn't explain it well enough. I literally completed the tornado puzzles through a lot of luck and accident. You spin the stick to build power and little dots indicate the power you're at, I only got it to go up to 3 (maybe that's full power, game didn't have good visual design for me to infer it cleary). But sometimes the fruit flew farther when there was less power, sometimes the fruit even seemed to get sucked back in by the tornado. It was difficult to throw the fruit at angle and place it precisely where you want.
I was experimenting with the lightning mechanic and I set some grass on fire, and the fruit source tree was right next to the grass. Therefore anytime I shocked the fruit out of the tree it rolled into the fire and I had to start over but the fire was still there. It was only until I was thoroughly confused and frustrated that I found there was a way to start the whole puzzle from default state and the fire went away. Then when I was trying to learn the wind/tornado/lightning mechanic there was a puzzle where the fruit came across a cave and I thought I had to use lightning to jump the fruit onto the top of the cave so that I could use wind to blow the fruit over the top of the cave instead of go into it.
Turns out that I needed to send the fruit into the cave and then use wind to blow it through the cave and then shock it up out of the cave, which I never wanted to try because the visual language suggests that you can't use wind in or around a cave. It was by accident that I noticed that wind started outside the cave would blow through it well enough to move the fruit.
Well said J-Bone. I don't have a problem with publishers, I just have problems with any particular people in any company big or small that have the wrong ideas about how to make games or do good business. There's a lot of bad news and bad stories developers can tell you about publishers, but there's also a ton of good stories people can tell, those stories just aren't as catchy. Publishers can help focus a team, instill an air of discipline and professionalism in an environment that can ultimately lead to happy employees, better games, and a development studio that survives past its first game. It all just depends on the policies and attitude of all the people involved.
It's not as simple as it sounds obviously, but the perfect recipe for making a game and being in a good environment requires you to blend all the skills of the two sides of the brain. You need left brain and right brain people to make it all work well. I don't want to work at a place where games are all charts and cold hard bullet points, but I also don't want to work at a place where people just run around all day spinning high minded concepts, sitting around the drum circle, and prophesizing how they're going to save the world through games. It can't just be g-men in suits or hippie artistes. You need diverse people that are all capable of settling into a solid middle ground where all the different minds can converge, share ideas, debate, decide on things, and then actually get the work done. Sometimes the best place to learn that kind of cohesiveness, discipline, and work ethic is from a good publisher.
Depends on the individual people because sometimes things can go horribly wrong and people end up hating certain people at publishers and how they've been treated by them.
Tristania is pretty great, I'll have to check this album out. I've only heard a little bit from them so far.
I'm listening to Halo of Blood right now too and I really enjoy it. It's not the best Bodom album but it's really good and better than Relentless Reckless Forever which I enjoy too. Halo of Blood has a little bit of Follow the Reaper DNA thrown back into the sound. The types of keyboard riffs and melodies in Halo of Blood are more reminiscent of the stuff they did in Follow the Reaper and Hatebreeder.
