coaxmetal

allowing language selection before download would be a great idea in general, and would probably save content distributors, like EA or MS or whoever, on bandwidth, but i've not idea if that is a significant cost to them at all. Probably depends on peering agreements. Implementing it would be non-trivial though, especially cross-platform. The content distributors (MS, Sony, Steam, wheover) would have to come up with an interface and api for language selection, and game devs would have to implement something to use that api or apis, and do whatever is necessary to selectively package their game with languages excluded. I've no idea how games are typically packaged so idk if thats hard or not.

I hope the preorder weapons are bad. I mean, I think i'm going to get them, but this game is a strange game to pull that kinda stuff in, because of how it is balanced and how items work in the game (assuming that it is like DeS or DkS1). My guess is they are probably ok starter weapons e: according to a dude on irc, they are weapons that already exist in-game, but the pre-order bonus lets you start with them. I don't know how i feel about that either.

It sure seems ballsy of Respawn and EA to put this out on the same day as the biggest release of the year, Dark Soul 2. Realistically if it wasn't for DkS2, I probably would be getting titanfall. Still might sometime, who knows.

I haven't seen it yet, assuming that's the latest one. Stupid crunchyroll delay. I did finish Shin Sekai Yori last weekend though. I really liked that. Good story, well told, and all serious which is rare. I guess because it isn't shounen.

Dark Souls 2 coming out the same day saves me the trouble of deciding whether I should install origin and try titanfall or not, since it is eclipsed by DkS2. just pirate one, I won't tell

short of doing both (which I am doing anyway), demon's souls works great with a PS4 controller plugged into ps3, I bet DkS2 will as well. That controller is very nice.

Yup, I did a similar thing. On the PS3 on DkS, I played a strength build (which ended up being a lit zwei build, since before they patched it that was better than weapons that scaled with str). When I got it again on PC when it came out, I played a dex build, and then started a mage after that. I'm also planning to stay away from wikis first run, and see what I can discover on my own, or maybe just with the help of forums and irc. Then i'll be all ready for when it really comes out, on PC.

I was going to make a thread called Dark Souls 2 Anticipation Station, and then rename it to Dark Souls 2 Participation Station once the game was out, but this thread title is also very good. I have preordered a copy for ps3, so I can enjoy figuring it out with everyone here, then i'll probably buy it again for PC. I'm good with money.

Not that anyone said it was, but I feel an implicit need to defend it, since most of what is brought up on the casts Is not that, and the general attitude seems to be negative toward escapism and/or genre fiction. Which is totally fair, and I don't think anyone is disparaging the literary taste of others. I certainly am not. But sometimes listening to people talk about fiction makes me feel irrationally guilty, and i've realized that, though I don't dislike more serious and contemporary fiction, I much prefer reading genre fiction. For me, it isn't even necessarily a qualitative thing; I can enjoy something I consider "bad". I recently finished a series by L.E. Modesitt, the Imager Portfolio. I don't think it was very good, but it was competent and I enjoyed reading it. I'm currently reading Glen Cook's The Black Company series, which I really like so far. I've found that, in general, I enjoy reading genre fiction, stuff like the Dresden Files, the Black Company, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Black Company, Malazan, etc, more than, uh, non-genre fiction. I just wanted to make a post about it, and to reaffirm, for myself, and hopefully for others, that there is nothing wrong with just enjoying books and fiction that is just fun to read, and maybe has no other merit, maybe is riddled with cliches, but things are cliche for a reason, right? I like when someone takes a genre and it's cliches and twists it, but I sometimes I just like me some good fantasy tropes. I wanted to make this thread to stake a claim that there is nothing shameful about genre fiction, though part of that is to convince myself and have people back me up. Which, I suppose, isn't an incredibly confident claim. So, What how do you guys feel about pure escapist, and genre fiction, like fantasy or scifi series? (I have focused on fantasy in particular, because I like it a lot, but also because it is almost always escapist, and good scfi is often speculative. Which I also love, but is not what I am addressing here). I think in the end, I am looking for vindication that genre fantasy books are still cool, and fun to read. Because they are (or can be, certainly many of them are still bad).

So, I noticed there isn't a DkS2 thread yet, which makes sense, not much info about that game yet. I decided that I am, in fact, going to buy it twice, so I preordered it for ps3, and I'll likely (as long as it is good, ofc) buy it again once it comes to PC. I did that with DkS1, after all. I'd really like to be part of a community working on discovering it as we play it for the first time though. I think the idle forums would be one of the best places for that, if there are enough of us that want to do that. I thought about joining the discussion on SA, but threads in Games move way too fast and are usually bad anyway.

Yeah, I'm not sure who those people are either. I almost stopped watching KLK at first, but stuck with it, and I'm glad I did, it's great, but I could certainly have done without quite that degree of fanservice, though it does play into the themes of the show, I suppose.

Oh, I never saw that. Thanks for sharing. I strongly disagree, as you might expect. That is a slightly different argument, but in general I don't like the sentiment that reading something just to enjoy it is somehow embarrassing, or even that work written simply to be enjoyed isn't worth respecting.

Yupppppp. You said it Twig. Gonna be great.

That looks really cool, I'm definitely going to check it out. Also, apparently it was (re) published by White Wolf, which seems like an odd fit. But then, maybe white wolf does other publishing, I guess I always though of them as the people who made the world of darkness games (to which my only connection is I like the game Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines a lot)

yeah, that's the feeling I get. People don't say bad things about genre fiction, but they are often casually, and likely unintentionally, dismissive of it, which sometimes rubs me the wrong way. It's cool to hear that there are academic studies of it though, I didn't realize that. It makes sense. I've often wondered why things like high-school required reading never includes some classic scifi, something like Dune, or Vonnegut or something.

I think this is the first post in the thread that is completely at odds with my tastes, but that's because black isle RPGs (all of them, but especially Torment) are my some of my favorite games. They are probably hard to get into though. I got into them from playing baldur's gate 2 as a kid, I don't know if I would be able to get into them now if I hadn't though.

I missed this last time I glanced at this thread. That's a really good point, one I hadn't though of.

I guess a big one for me is mario games. Never enjoyed them, I didn't play them as a kid since I didn't have any consoles, and I've never been into games in which the primary mechanic is difficult platforming, or even easy platforming. I just get frustruated and don't really have any cooresponding sense of accomplishment as a payoff.

oh man, I guess it was. I recently got a new keyboard from wasdkeyboards.com, they do custom mechanical keyboards. Which is awesome if you like mechanical keyboards, though there are cheaper ones (like the Rosewill RK-9000, which I use at work. It's hard to find in stock though). I was replacing a Das Keyboard, which had also taken too many spills. If you don't want to go mechanical, I got nothing.

I was ready to just dismiss this game because I generally don't like competetive multiplayer shooters. The last one I played a lot of was Modern Warfare 2, and I loved it, but that also burnt me out on the COD flavor of shooter, and multiplayer shoters in general. So I was just going to ignore titanfall. I still might, But when Sean mentioned on the cast that the last shooter he played much of was also MW2, I realized that yeah, it has been a while, and I could probably go for another. So I may give this a shot after all, but not on launch day. Dark Souls 2 is far more important.

I think the term genre fiction has meaning, but it is usually used disparagingly, Also its really hard to type this, my cat is trying to help. Ok that's better, she moved to my laptop and is now typing in irc. Anyway, I definitely agree wrt science fiction. There can be purely escapist scifi, but the best scifi is mostly speculative, and explores a lot of ideas. There are a lot of directions it can be taken. I think my main thrust with this thread though is to defend the legitimacy of something that uses common scifi or fantasy (or mystery or crime etc) tropes. Certainly, leaning on them too hard will just make a work predictable and boring, but I think even working within the confines of what is usually considered genre fiction can make works that are fun to read. I think that I tend to consume more media that is just satisfying, rather than thought provoking. Not that I am adverse to that, but I certainly engage in far less. Often when I go to a book, I don't want to work.

Good to know, I will avoid it. I was planning to, since I am enjoying the show. I'm a bit over halfway through now. Is sword art online one of those that takes place in an MMO? I've never really liked those. Too many steps removed I guess. There seem to be quite a few of them though. Anyone here read any of Tsutomu Nihei's work? He did Blame! and a few other things, I'm reading the official (I read the fan translation previouslyt) translation of Knights of Sidonia, and I really enjoy it. It's a lot easier to follow this his other work, but still has his signature style. Good scifi space manga. I wish more volumes were out in English though.

I've never heard the definition of alpha and beta by a testing pool either, CLWheeljack's definition maps to what I think of. Beta is definitely pretty much always agreed upon as feature complete. The idea of alpha as feature lock makes sense, I've always thought of it as a more nebulous "resembles the final product in structure and some content, but doesn't have all of both yet". I'm also speaking from a general software background though, and not a video game background. The distinction the OP makes about stages of a game being enjoyable or not doesn't seem to map to the traditional idea of alpha and beta as based on features at all, I think that's an entirely separate distinction. Plenty of games that are deemed alpha are enjoyable (like the most recent trend of early access stuff, or just like, minecraft from a few years ago), and some games that are finished and released aren't any fun at all. I think whether a game is fun is subjective anyway, so trying do define a game's state by that seems difficult.

Yeah I got an email with that info in it. I think it's because I purchesed the all-episodes pack a while back. Really looking forward to where they go with it.

Yeah I've seen this before. You can make it so certian people can tell the bot to do op-things, so it's like they are stealth ops. I bet there's a few open source implementations of said bot, or something similar.