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The Lancer is generally regarded as being extremely underpowered in the first game, while the Hammerburst has been nerfed for each subsequent game.

The sniper rifle wasn't new to Gears 2, and it works the same as it did in 1. Anyways, I think Gears 2 is not as good as Gears 1, mostly just for all the annoying vehicle sequences though.

With the master key, there's a few areas you can completely skip. (Like the sewers and most of blight town.)

Don't worry about it. You can also lose him if

It varies a lot for me. If i'm tired, i just get a headache and see a double image. When it works, though, i think it's probably the nicest 3D-effect i've seen.

I can vouch for the save bug triggering if you attack him right when you first let him out of his cell, but it stopped when i killed him. Took a couple respawns, but he's slow and easy to backstab. (Lure him out into the open so you have more room to move.) After i killed him, the autosave stopped and the game started working normally again. There must be something screwed with that NPC's scripting. As far as i'm aware, it's the only really serious, reproducible, and detrimental bug in the game. I mean, i've also read stories from people complaining about getting stuck in walls, the game crashing, saves corrupting. None of it seems particularly widespread, just things somebody will eventually report for any game. The PS3 version sounds more prone to crashing, though. You can target them, you just can't defend against or harm them without being cursed or using a temporary transient curse item. You also don't actually have to go into that area until very late in the game, at which point they're very easy to deal with. If you head into there earlier though, there's a lot of good items in the areas that are accessible at that point. (Such as - ) Also, divine weapons don't do anything to the ghosts. The only particularly evident effect of the holy status on a weapon is, i am told, preventing the catacomb skeletons from reviving. (This is why NPC's keep telling you to forge divine weapons for the catacombs.) As for occult weapons, i have no idea what weapons with dark status do, i wish i did. Anybody know?

Did Fable 2 really never come out on the PC? That's really unfortunate, it's easily the best in the series. Miffy - If you didn't like the combat in 2, you're not going to like 3. It's pretty much the same system, but even more brain dead and effortless.

Anyways, I've really hit an impasse with the Tomb of the Giants. It's the only thing i have left to do in the game, but i just get fucking destroyed in there. By far the hardest part of the game, i think. (Even once you find one of several means to provide light in the area.) Also, apparently From has been publishing patch notes for the upcoming update on their Japanese site. The Google translations i've seen aren't exactly clear, but it seems that they're going to implement a lot of PVP-focused balance changes. The Ring of Fog, which keeps people from locking onto you, is being nerfed. It sounds like stat-growth modifiers are being buffed just in general. (Since, as it stands, there's basically no reason to go for a heavy strength/dexterity build. Lightning/Fire weapons vastly exceed the damage potential of even a +15 normal with good modifiers, with the added benefit of you having been able to focus skill points into things like vitality and endurance, rather than strength/dex.) There was also something about shields and magic defense. Also various netcode fixes, and it sounded like they might be adding a way to organize co-op with friends. (Sounded like, Google translate and all.) Also been reading about some of the bugs in the game, there aren't too many big issues, but there are issues. (And neither of the following issues are apparently being addressed yet.) The game will rarely drop inputs just randomly, which i know is something i've definitely experienced and been frustrated by. At first i thought it must have been my fault, but it happened enough that it was obviously the game, and obviously it's happening to other people. Very annoying in such a precision-demanding game. (Also, not a bug, but i find the way it buffers moves very annoying. Getting overly enthusiastic about spamming that attack button can lock you into very lengthy chained attack animations. You'll hit attack twice, the first attack will miss and you'll realize you need to block instead, but your dude is still carrying out the second attack you buffered during the first. Annoying.) I've also read that the game can dive into a constant autosave state that has been reported to overheat consoles and wear out hard-drives. (The flame in the corner won't disappear if it starts.) Apparently something to do with the NPC Lautrec is the most common trigger. (I remember my game actually started doing this, but stopped when i .)

I've heard a lot people saying they did this,

The Drake Sword is kind of the scrub weapon in the game, it's a high level weapon that is extremely easy to get very early in the game. It also doesn't have any skill-derived stat growth and tops out pretty low once upgraded, so it's eventually outpaced by other weapons, but it can easily last you twenty to thirty hours if you're not grinding for upgrades on other weapons or something. It's worth emphasizing that the demon/twinkling titanite and dragon scale-upgraded weapons are, in general, unable to compete with the standard weapons once they've been pushed all the way down one of the upgrade paths. I personally use a unique short sword with a bleed status effect upgraded to fire +10. The raw damage is something like 220 physical and 220 fire, and it retains that bleed effect, so it's kind of crazy.

x9ymysN3qQ8 I think i'll just leave this here, it pretty much speaks for itself.

There were a lot of things that Daggerfall did that i wish would be revisited in a new TES game, like having a calender that actually matters, with seasons and holidays and everything.

Daggerfall totally did all of that. Also, If you slept outside instead of somewhere safe like an inn, you ran the risk of being attacked in your sleep. Daggerfall was fucking crazy.

xc5XSP8Mj8M I love everything about this video. And look at that guy, he's fucking jazzed about horse racing.

AGkYxVNuXtU This apparently comes out in November. Shin`en's shooters on the Nintendo handhelds have always been pretty entertaining.

You probably have and don't realize it, there's things like hidden NPC invader phantoms with rare items to drop that will disappear if you don't encounter them before fighting the boss in that area. A lot of one-chance kind of things. This doesn't seem like a game you can do a 100% clear on, there's just varying degrees of how badly you've screwed up before finding the final boss. I just lost 37 thousand souls and 3 humanities not long ago. It hurts. I also broke a covenant, had to kill a bunch of newly hostile NPC's, and accumulated sin that will now have Darkmoon players hunting me. (At my level, getting the one NPC to pardon me of my sins and reset the NPC hostility would have necessitated hours of grinding souls, i didn't think it was worth it.) I also messed up an incredibly long event chain that has been carrying on through most of the game. A few other things too. Kind of one after the other. Don't play Dark Souls when you're groggy, i guess? Edit: Also, it was probably dung that drops from one of the enemies in Blight Town. Toxin does way more damage than poison, there's no way boost resistance to it, and the items that cure it are rare. (The blooming something something, the treants in the Darkroot Garden occasionally drop it.)

FABLE 3! Fable 3 makes me angry! One of the biggest disappointments i've had in a long, long time. It seemed like they were hunting for ways to make it more accessible, and really just ended up with a usability nightmare. I mean, here's a game that has an actual functioning inventory system, but no way to directly interact with or manage it. I literally could not believe that when i started playing the game, i thought i must be missing something. Just overly contextualized madness, it's filled with incredibly bizarre game design. I was really frustrated by a lot of the other changes too. The new magic and weapon upgrade systems in particular, but also the new system of NPC interactions that turned that whole process into incredible tedium, it made a once fun diversion something you went out of your way to avoid. The world, just in general, also seemed so much smaller and less diverse than either of the earlier two games. I mean, and the execution of their big central idea for the game, that you'd have to make hard choices, seemed so completely half-assed. (In both the simplistic morality being pushed and the fact that you could completely break it if you understood how it was working.) I was left with the impression that Fable 3 was a game that must have had several really hard swings in design direction during development, because it just feels like such a disjointed mess. (I remember hearing that it was supposed to be a kinect-integrated game, and it felt like there was some conceptual DNA of that left in the shipped product.)

Does this forum have an emote for face-palming resignation? I have made many irreversible mistakes in fairly rapid succession, and I am frustrated with my mistake making.

Jon Cole forgot the propylon indices, which... Granted... you would have to play a fucking lot of Morrowind to figure that system of teleports out. (Oh, hey. Orvidos touched on it, never mind. It's worth noting that it was actually a part of the game prior to that official plug-in, but since it was so obscured and nobody knew it was there, they made it into a side quest to bring it to the attention of more players.) Morrowind was actually the only mainline TES without an integrated "go-anywhere" fast-travel. (I don't remember how Battlespire or Redguard approached the issue, though.) In Daggerfall and Arena, the fast-travel was really just necessary to be able to cope with the ridiculous scale of those games. For the others, I've always been of the opinion that the fast-travel kind of cheapens the carefully made worlds of Fallout 3 and Oblivion, and I prefer how Morrowind did it. Once you had a good understanding of the systems there, you could get anywhere really quickly, but you had to actually learn the layout of the gameworld to get to that point.

There's an achievement for one quest that i don't think you can get without the aug, but it's kind of useless, otherwise.

What? I don't see why this is a question. It's because that's not the game Bethesda set out to make, those guys were very upfront about Fallout 3 being a game that was supposed to be more about a central narrative. (Whether you think they succeeded in that, or that in having done so, if it was a good thing for them to do, those are different matters.) Just because everybody wants to say it's Oblivion with guns doesn't mean it's literally Oblivion with guns. I absolutely do not agree that Oblivion's side content is "less deep". There is perhaps less of it, but those quests and events are as elaborate or moreso than anything in Morrowind. Man, and nothing is going to stack up to Daggerfall if you want to use that as your benchmark, that game is ridiculous. I don't think there's any clearly linear trend here to cause worry, Daggerfall was such an anomaly just in general, and Morrowind and Oblivion are only two games. (That still have more in common with eachother than any other two TES games, it's like arguing apples and apples.) What about Arena? Or Battlespire and Redguard? TES has been all over the map. I expect that Skyrim will probably "feel" a lot like Oblivion when it comes to the core game mechanics, but if we're going to talk about Skyrim on the whole, i'd assert that we don't actually know enough about the game to make any real guesses about where it's going to fall in the spectrum of TES games. They're betting heavily on dynamically generated content this time, something that neither Morrowind or Oblivion did. (Or Fallout 3, for that matter.)

Fallout 3 wasn't an Elder Scrolls game and wasn't built around having tons of side factions. Even so, i would argue that neither of those games were lacking in side content. (Oblivion though, especially. Come on. There's a lot of bad things that can be said about Oblivion, but that it's factional side quests were lacking is not one of them.) Like, and are people actually making a big deal out of this two hours thing? It's just the way Bethesda's games are structured; if you know what to do and where to go ahead of time, you can sequence break like a crazy person. As pointed out, quite infamously, people have done Morrowind speedruns in about ten minutes.

It'll be interesting to keep an eye on some of the wiki guides for the game, i'm sure people will find a lot of cool stuff. (Right now there is nothing helpful anywhere, the way the game autosaves has been impeding anybody writing any comprehensive guide information.)

The master key is opening doors that would otherwise be opened with other keys or from the other side. (It also doesn't open everything, just certain things.) It's basically for sequence breaking, and so you're exploring into areas that are vastly, vastly above your current level. The gifts really don't matter all that much, none of them are very good. (Some of them have neat one-off hidden purposes, some are just a complete waste.) The master key is probably the most useful, but it's really not even as useful as it sounds like it should be. It is, however, apparently the only starting gift that cannot be found once the game has begun. (Binoculars are literally only a few hundred feet away from the firelink bonfire.) Realistically, the mini-bosses are a bigger threat than the bosses. It's really, really hard to take the bosses significantly out of sequence, but it's easy to come across... say... a giant hydra that can and will one-hit-kill you. So if something looks dangerous, try to give it a wide berth and move on, come back to it later. (If you're evading everything, you shouldn't be there, and hitting a bonfire will trap you in an extremely unpleasant situation.) The healing spell is extremely useful, even just as extra healing charges, period. (The spell has a long casting animation though, use it between battles. If you need to heal in a fight, rely on the estus flask.) I don't think faith builds can really focus too much on miracles though, they typically have very limited charges compared to the pyromancies and sorceries, and good miracles are harder to come by. (Only miracles offer healing though.) So don't neglect your other stats, basically. (At least until you can start forging divine or occult weapons that get stat gains off of your faith, then go nuts.) Also - Healing miracles are awesome when you're a guest/invader phantom, because as a phantom, you cannot use your estus flask. (If you're a host, keep this in mind. Your estsus flask has an area of effect heal to your summoned phantoms.)

I've occasionally had this problem too, i had done some quick searching about it and it seemed to be the typical "the game is way more popular than they anticipated and the servers are being hammered." It's not an online game, but it is a game that is always online. I just keep hitting the signs as they appear and eventually they go through. The gargoyles are probably the easiest major boss encounter in the game, i think. (At least, it's the only boss i beat on my first try.) If you have souls and humanities you're afraid of losing, go level up or buy some stuff from the nearby blacksmith and then kindle that bonfire so you have more estus flasks for the fight.