Ultimate Videogame Topic 3: The Next Generation

[Natirasha]

Witch Hunt is not canon anymore, though

[Iecerint]

Huh? Yes it is. There are choices related to it in Dragon Age Keep.

[Sudo_Nym]

Witch Hunt is still canon. I had it referenced.

[Iecerint]

By the way, did anyone notice how the Tallis stuff made it into DA:I? You can choose whether you made her angry and whether you kissed her. Maybe a war table thing or a line in

the Fade

if you didn't romance anyone?

[Sudo_Nym]

The only place I noticed anything about Tallis is that Varric will ask Iron Bull about her in a party banter.

[InflatablePie]

Hatoful Boyfriend is amazing and all of you should play it.

this is quite possibly one of the best games I have played in the past year.

[Natirasha]

Huh? Yes it is. There are choices related to it in Dragon Age Keep.

I was unaware! I know one of the writers said during the leadup to DAI that Witch Hunt wasn't canon anymore because they wanted to bring Morrigan back.

Glad to see they found some way around that.

[Sudo_Nym]

I'm not sure what happens if you

stab Morrigan before she falls through the Eluvian

, but I think that was the choice I made on this playthrough, so we'll see. I do know that if you

romanced Morrigan and choose to go through the Eluvian with her to see your son, both she and Kieran will talk about this fact, and Kieran will even be wearing a griffon necklace that was supposedly given to him by the Warden.

[Iecerint]

If Leliana died in DA:O, you can talk to her about it. ^_^

[Sudo_Nym]

She mentioned it in DA2, as well, but only enough to brush off an actual explanation.

[Chevre]

Hatoful Boyfriend is amazing and all of you should play it.

this is quite possibly one of the best games I have played in the past year.

I did purchase it based on someone claiming it was very good. But, like all things I purchased this steam sale, I had no intetion of playing them anytime soon. :/

[theaceofspades]

Anyone else been playing around with the Halo 5 Beta? This week its AR + Magnus loadout locked for those who don't like playing BRs.

Its decent enough, still get the feeling that they are adding new things to make it not be the same old game, but I miss Halo 2 and 3 still where it was very pure basic BR type play.

i've been playing it a lot. BRs are up now which is a plus for me. I had misgivings about clamber but really it just seems to be a simpler crouch jump. I also like thruster pack more than i though i would. Move speed seems perfect again. and no AAs. I'm happy. As a guy who's not really been fully captured by a game since H3 i'm happy. Oh and the hydra is ridiculous with hover.

Downside. I think kill times are too fast. just slightly, at least with the AR. But at least the sniper rifle feels right again.

Breakout is like speedball. Hella fun, and really kind of stupid.

[LlamaFluff]

i've been playing it a lot. BRs are up now which is a plus for me. I had misgivings about clamber but really it just seems to be a simpler crouch jump. I also like thruster pack more than i though i would. Move speed seems perfect again. and no AAs. I'm happy. As a guy who's not really been fully captured by a game since H3 i'm happy. Oh and the hydra is ridiculous with hover.

Rating system is still a pain, more based on winning than performance (recently lost rank on a game I went +19 on). Have issues with matchmaking balance as well where it just seems to at times put me in games I have no business being in both ways. H3 ranking was the best, Reach was the absolute worst which this seems similar to.

Breakout is fun, but needs either far more or less BR. Too many times a person who isn't good with it grabs it and that basically loses the round right there.

[theaceofspades]

agreed on all points.

I haven't actually noticed much team creating based on rank at all. Seems fairly random. Though it's possible i'm just not yet good at picking out stacks.

A goodness. H3 lone wolves ranked. i feel nostalgic and i'm not even 30.

Breakout fills my speedball fix now that i'm too poor to actually play it. First day i had a bunch of glitches where it dropped me outside the map for no apparent reason. So that was weird.

I've now taken a policy of never taking the BR, simply because people don't know how to play around it. They either grab it and sit way in the back till it's 3 on 1. or they rush face first and die. NOw i just go for the risking run through the middle plays. Way better success rate. And if you take it they expect you to play one of those ways. Sigh. I need to get a group together again. Interested?

I think it's necessary to resign myself to the fact that Matchmaking will never be good again. Never played anything that did it as well as 3. Now i'm just a sucker for the proper gameplay

[hasdgfas]

I just finished Dragon Age: Awakening. I had forgotten how ridiculously buggy this game was, leading to the complete inability to complete two companion quests, and

Velanna's Joining

. Thank goodness for the Keep, I guess.

[Sudo_Nym]

Oh, yeah, you can't complete

Velanna or Sigrun's Joinings

if you haven't done them before the Blackmarsh. And

Velanna's companion quest

can only be triggered by a random encounter.

[hasdgfas]

And then

Oghren's companion quest

, which you can only do if you're perfect with every single dialogue involving him for the entire game, as far as I can tell.

And then I ran into the

Silverite Mine bug, where all my currently worn equipment disappeared

. That was fun. I'm glad I had a prior save.

[Sudo_Nym]

One of the big problems I have with the companions in Awakening is that you mostly gain approval from them by giving them gifts- if you don't find every gift, or get confused and give one to the wrong person (and it's much less intuitive as to which gift is intending for whom), you can miss out on the bonus. This is especially bad for Oghren, since his approval resets for Awakening, but his gift counter doesn't, so any gifts you gave him in Origins will make gifting less effective in Awakening.

Also infuriating is that most of the companion dialogues are triggered not by talking to them, but finding the right interaction spot in the world somewhere. So if you don't take every companion to every location with you, you'll miss out on chances for approval.

[Zachrulez]

The approval system is really an unnecessary attempt to add realism/complexity to the game. Really what does it lead to? Forcing you to go through the game in a specific way to try to make everyone happy so that you can max their approval and not miss any of those juicy story points. Why exactly is that better than just having all the content accessible without having to go through such a ridiculous system? Sometimes simple is better.

[Sudo_Nym]

First, it's important because in DA:O and DA:A, your companions get stat points if they like you enough!

Second, it's not really important. In a character driven game, it's important to determine what relationship the player character has to the NPCs, since that's not something you can nail down like intra-NPC relationships. The relationship meter is the best thing they came up with for quantifying whether an NPC likes or dislikes you, and it's not terribly nuanced, but computers are great at perfectly simulating human interactions. Mass Effect didn't have an approval system, and it worked fine. The relationship system is more invisible in DA:I, but still extant. DA2 tried to experiment with it, to mixed results.

It's like the two franchises are experimenting with removing that sort of thing. Mass Effect had a karma system, but no relationship meters; Dragon Age had relationship meters, but no karma system. I wouldn't be surprised if the next Bioware franchise featured neither.

[zoraster]

The issue is how to get people to believe that their choices matter. Obviously there are the big choices that are scripted in a couple of branching ways (Do you save Ashley or not-as-hot-guy-who-no-one-knows-the-name-of-but-probably-isn't-a-racist?), but Bioware games have a ton of stuff that doesn't have anything to do with that so it's nice to have some of the choices matter in some game-specific way. The problem of course is that it's limiting, particularly the ME ones (I don't feel like being an asshole this time, but dammit I need Renegade points!)

[Iecerint]

Wtf? Kaidan is extremely hot, and he's stronk in ME3.

[Iecerint]

He's also gay irl. ^_^

But he's not Aisha Tyler.

[zoraster]

I didn't play ME3 because I couldn't go more than 5 minutes without getting motion sick :-/

[hasdgfas]

One of the big problems I have with the companions in Awakening is that you mostly gain approval from them by giving them gifts- if you don't find every gift, or get confused and give one to the wrong person (and it's much less intuitive as to which gift is intending for whom), you can miss out on the bonus. This is especially bad for Oghren, since his approval resets for Awakening, but his gift counter doesn't, so any gifts you gave him in Origins will make gifting less effective in Awakening.

Also infuriating is that most of the companion dialogues are triggered not by talking to them, but finding the right interaction spot in the world somewhere. So if you don't take every companion to every location with you, you'll miss out on chances for approval.

Yeah. I like the fact that all the gifts are more unique as opposed to slight variants on the same type of item. But it makes it

much

harder to figure out who wants what. Unless you have the conversations with them about the arbitrary items before you find the items. I still really like awakening's story more than Origins, but Origins is cleaner and more polished, and Party Camp is the best.