kael

Since groups don't show up in the Dota 2 lobby (sigh), have people been using an in-game chat channel? I found one called idlethumbs but it doesn't seem to get many visitors.

For anyone playing act 2, if you get a crash right when something notable happens ( ), try restarting the game and going through that sequence again. It worked for me the second time. Also, the game might make it seem like there's a sense of urgency in act 2... but you should ignore that, because I didn't and it turns out there was no need to rush. Now I have to play the whole act over again to see all the stuff I missed along the way. If you get stuck in the (I definitely thought I was stuck for more than a few minutes), try walking around the bottom edge of the screen. You'll know what you're looking for once you find it. Definitely a lot more bugs in Act 2 than in Act 1, but the experience is still otherworldly and intriguing. I can't even accurately describe some of the clever stuff they're doing in this game.

There are other puzzle rooms with save corruption bugs, PEC is just the worst. The general advice I've heard is not to save in any puzzle rooms. I'm not aware of anyone losing progress by saving outside one.

I've never finished Baldur's Gate despite starting playthroughs perhaps 6 or 7 times. It just happens to be long enough that I get distracted before the end, and then lo and behold, I lose my saves the next time I reformat my PC (or in one particular case, discover the version of the game I'm playing is broken and can't export saves. Thanks Gametap.) Despite this I still periodically get that itch and go back and try again. Most recently I decided to try it in the BG2 engine using BGT, so we'll see if I get around to finishing this time. The worst example in my gaming history is probably The Last Remnant, though. According to Steam I have 180 hours of playtime logged on that game and it is probably accurate. I was literally on the last boss doing optional content and managed to lose that save. I like the game enough that I've tried restarting from the beginning at least once but the idea of having to spend even half that much time to get back to where I was is kind of a downer. Sno: Really sorry to hear you hit the VLR save bug. I was terrified of that the entire time I played. For you or anyone else playing on the 3DS, my trick is to use the Flow button to go back to a story section any time I hit a new puzzle room. Once you're in the story section you can safely save, and then jump back to the beginning of that puzzle room.

One real problem with a kickstarter like this is that it relies heavily on backers' imaginations. They dedicate a ton of time and energy to talking up the potential of their technology and the strength of their design approach. As a game developer, I can understand this and try and extrapolate from that to imagine what they can build with that technology, but I don't think the average gamer is going to be able to create remotely realistic expectations, and I think in some cases such a strong focus on technology can drive people away. Sometimes a piece of technology has immediately obvious, cool uses - Oculus Rift being one notable example where I think pretty much anyone who saw the kickstarter pitch for it immediately understood why it might be interesting - but this is not one of those cases. A kickstarter pitch video where multiple seconds are spent dragging light sources and tables and chairs around is probably not doing a very good job of communicating a project's potential to the layman unless the project is actually about physically simulating tables and chairs. Again, as a programmer, I can look at that technology and think 'that's neat', but even so, it's not neat enough to make me want to give them money, because the kickstarter is theoretically about a game, not an engine. For a more informative example, look at CLANG - their kickstarter pitch was fundamentally about technology, but they repeatedly connected the dots and explained clearly to a layman what that cool new technology would do for them. It's unfortunate, really. There are some tiny glimpses of great stuff in there, even though I mostly like the pitch video because it's full of hilariously bad looking janky animation - but as a whole it conveys a picture of a development team that's hopelessly obsessed with technology at the expense of things that make a game world fun to explore or make a game's mechanics interesting to interact with. The design aspirations they express on the kickstarter page are admirable but ultimately meaningless given that the game hasn't actually been designed or built yet, which makes it inevitable that some (if not all) of their design decisions will have to be reconsidered once they make contact with reality. I hope these guys figure out how to bring their kickstarter to successful completion. They might be able to pick up momentum if they rework it to focus on the project's strengths and get people more excited - there's enough interest around it to suggest that it's possible. P.S. It pisses me off that kickstarter shows prices in £ for users coming from countries that don't use that as a currency. Showing backer levels in price points that mean literally nothing to people is not a great way to encourage them to take a chance and back something. (And yes, I don't think the prices should be in USD for American kickstarters if you're from outside the US, either).

That's one of the game's best design decisions, I think. Along with the fact that you can finish quests without returning to the quest giver, it makes questing in the game a lot less tedious than it would be otherwise. I hated the AI a lot less once I realized you could use the dpad to order them to attack your target or run away. That usually covers most of the problems with it (though it's difficult to get them to set up chains sometimes - I'm not sure if that's from them being locked into an attack animation, or what).Random highlight: One of the characters you get has a tanking specialization, and if you unlock it, they get defense bonuses for fighting naked.