Bjorn

For a few years, I had near perfect Reed Richard's silver temples. It was completely awesome. But now the grey is spreading. I'm contemplating dying the rest of it to have my distinguished temples back. Something about me ought to be distinguished at this age, and it's not going to be the rest of me.

Like Mington? :woohoo: :woohoo:

OMG. GOTY, of all the years (minor, gee-whiz, neato spoiler). I have seen a few bugs though, it certainly needs a patch. There have been minor things like the wrong character portrait loading up for NPCs (corrected later on load). There have been a couple of possibly more serious glitches involving NPCs not appropriately moving when they are supposed to. Both times were solved with a reload, and thankfully I had quicksaves really close. If either would have persisted, they would have been very bad bugs. It may be that both were basically fine, and would have corrected over time, but I was paranoid about those NPCs being stuck forever. And lastly, either the Leadership skill is bugged or has an incorrect tool tip. It says it should give 2 percent/level, but only gives 1 percent/level. That makes it much, much less valuable. Nothing has forced me to lose more than a few minutes, but for those of you who are worried about a buggy game, it might be worth waiting for the first patch. I'm glad I've jumped into it now though, when I'm having to just play and there aren't any guides I can consult (because I'm usually such a terrible min/maxer in games like this).

This is my favorite anecdote in this thread.

Hammerwatch is one of the games in the current HumbleBundle, which I had almost bought multiple times anyways since it has local co-op. It's a Gauntlet style dungeon crawler. There's progression through merchants, upgrading your basic attacks, health, mana and unlocking new abilities. It supports up to four players with local, online and LAN support (though I don't think you can do both local and online simultaneously unfortunately). It's not a roguelike, as the levels appear to all be fixed, but chest contents are randomized. You do have a limited number of lives, run out, and you're starting over. There are checkpoints to save your progress. It's got 6 classes, all of which feel like they play nice and different from one another. It's really fun! We played a few hours of it last night, and it really scratches that dungeon crawling itch. I played solo for about a half hour, which was fine, but not nearly as good as co-op. There's no inventory to manage, or loot to sort through, or boring quest dialogue to suffer through. Just a couple of us running through a dungeon murdering things and exploring, finding secret passageways and manipulating some simple puzzles. The only really bad thing we hit was one spike puzzle, where we each had to manipulate buttons to change a spike pattern on a floor. One of us got killed, and you respawn on top of a teammate. The result was that we were completely stuck, there was no way to manipulate the puzzle to escape because we were on a dead end side of it, so we had to revert to an earlier save. That was a bummer.

I wonder how many state mottoes you could kill before someone got around to passing a law stopping you from using state mottoes as political party names?

Thanks for the clarification, I am obviously speaking as a pure outsider and just how I perceive what DF as a company has been changing into since the release of Brütal Legend. Which overall I think is one of the most interesting companies in gaming with their shift to smaller projects.

A few years ago, Kansas let people vote on what the next tag design would be. It was shit like more wheat, the statehouse and a couple of other boring things. There was a small movement (which I supported) to put John Brown on the tag. Of course it went no where. I still dream of an alternate universe where there are millions of cars that all have John Brown's crazy face right in the middle of them. Edited to add: John Brown is tiny photoshop away from being a wizard.

I feel like, once again, I may not have communicated my point well. I wasn't intending to say that DF is intentionally stingy. My assumption is they pay what they can afford to given the revenues they have coming in while also maintaining certain staff levels without doing layoffs. The in-between spot that you describe is really what I was getting at. Along with the culture/environment benefits that come with that are also other professional opportunities that might not be present at the other two ends of the scale (AAA and very small indie), that a place like DF can deliver. Basically, I was trying to say is that there are valid professional reasons someone would work at DF other than the "It's a great place to work!" reason, even if they are able to make a larger paycheck somewhere else.

Of course that's assuming it's true and not just made up bullshit! Which is very possible. But given the insane history of pretty much every single MG character (clones, cyborgs, ninjas, cyborg ninjas, cyborg PTSD-suffering animal vixens, bee men, vampires, ghost possessed transplanted arms (or not!)) It would actually come off as being rather sane compared to some of the previous stuff. The thing that would convince that it's wrong would be if Kojima said, "Yep, good work guys, you nailed it. Quiet is Chico." Then I would be convinced that something else entirely was going on. Being a MG fan kind of makes you a bit of a conspiracy theorist.

Yeah, the problem with it is that

I may not have emphasized the most important part of my post, which is that your odds of being able to helm a project as creative lead at DF are likely significantly higher than many other studios. If you believe that you eventually want to be a creative lead, or even go out and start your own studio, DF (again, from a pure outsiders perspective) looks like a much better career bet than just making more money at another studio where you will not have that opportunity. Based on the variety of funding they get and the documentary, you are also likely to get a much better look at the finances of a game company than at other devs. I wasn't trying to make a "it's great to work here!" argument, I was trying to say that for future career goals, working at DF may simply be the better path than other, better paying jobs.

It's at the bottom of the page that has your Steam key on it. I think it's just called the rewards page, there's just a paragraph at the very bottom that describes how you unlock that skill. It just adds some description text of some things, usually automatically as you walk by (I'm assuming that's what I've seen). There are also some things in the environment you can right click on and get a description, even though no icon appears.

I played it. I didn't find all the audio tapes when playing, but I went and listened to some of the ones I missed afterwards. If you're curious, you can listen to all the and judge for yourself. Audio tapes 4 and 7 are the two most important ones, if you want to jump around (and honestly, listening to the whole thing in a row alternates between being painful and painfully boring). In my earlier long comment, I focused on the mechanical and design issues that bothered me, in part because I really didn't know how to address this part. I mean, bad shit happens to most of the characters in MG at some point, and it looks like they are ratcheting that up for V. And that's what the thing with Paz/Chico feels like to me, not that it is necessary, interesting, or compelling in any way. But that it was an easy way to deliver shocking trauma to multiple characters in one shot. And Ground Zeroes is supposed to be setting the stage for, in part, these characters dealing with the all these different traumas. The handling of it in GZ just doesn't give me any faith in their ability to explore these issues going into the main game. Tied into that idea of V being about the traumas of GZ, there's also a fairly compelling theory about Quiet's (spoilers, obviously), which if true, would probably be far worse than anything in Ground Zeroes. It's equally ridiculous and possible, so it naturally fits in with the Metal Gear world.

That seems both believable, and a worthwhile tradeoff for employees who make that decision. DF is producing so many titles, it seems like a great place for someone who wants to make smaller, indie games (and maybe even helm their own game at some point), without having to personally take on the risks and challenges of running an indie studio themselves. At least, that's how I've seen DF from the outside for the last 6 years or so.

And I agree with a lot of that too! It's hard to cover the full ground of the good and bad of early funding right now without basically writing an essay.

Double Post! Some more in-depth thoughts on it. After playing for about an hour, I ended up starting over and rebuilding my team, realizing that I felt like I had made some pretty poor choices. Character creation is great, I spent well over an hour figuring out how to design my team, and made a Charlie's Anglels type group with one dude and three badass ladies. I can't remember the last time that I actually had to put some thought and care into just creating characters, which is something I occaisioanally miss from old school games. After seeing combat in action, I realized I had over-priortized Action Points and under-valued initiative and move speed. I had also completely misread how one stat worked (my fault, not the game's). I could probably keep restarting over and over until I felt like I had a "perfect" team, but won't. I just wanted one that was better than what I started with. Finding a balance between AP, initiative, speed, combat abilities and non-combat abilities is surprisingly challenging even with four characters. There's a lot of attention to detail so far in the world description. Backers get a special ability that just adds flavor text to the world, which is something I wouldn't mind if they just let everyone have (and that might be possible, because you just unlock it with a hidden conversation option you type in). The first real conversation I had where there were multiple ways to handle it was suitably varied, including a pretty surprising outcome that got a genuine chuckle out of me. There are also critical successes (and probably failures?) in conversation skill checks that can affect how conversations go. I've only found one hidden conversation option so far. You can always type keywords into the conversation interface to see what someone says. The one I found was just a bit of flavor/backstory text. It was neat, but I'm not sure I'll worry about typing a bunch of stuff into every conversation to see if there are any hidden things. I hit the first major decision point in the game, and am impressed with it so far. It's got a suitable amount of gravity to it, and the storyline/dialogue built around it makes it feel very weighty in a way that games rarely do. I'm really impressed so far, and feel like I've got pretty much what I was expecting out of W2.

Ha! That's funny, because I've had the same reaction when other people have abbreviated it EA. Otherwise, I completely agree with you. We are far enough into early funding now that buyer expectations should be set pretty appropriately for what may or may not happen with early access games.

That's kind of what the Zomboid guy was arguing, that if you start an EA game, you are ethically obligated to finish it no matter what kind of hardship it creates for you...which is a really problematic thing to argue for me.

And I would make the opposite argument, if a game is designed with co-op in mind (which I think Hammerwatch was), then how it plays with others is the most important part. To me, that's like saying "Sure, Mortal Kombat is fun with friends, but it's that single player campaign that really matters." Just like some games are designed around PvP, some games are built to have co-op as the main event and it is the single player campaign that's the add-on. Also, I strenuously disagree that everything is better with a friend. Diablo 3 was just as shitty with other people as it was alone. I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I know that I've played games that were actually worse in co-op, usually due to some terrible design decisions. Fable 2? Fable 2 co-op was shit, that's for sure.

We beat the expansion campaign this afternoon! It's much shorter than the main campaign, about half as long. One tip, you don't get enough ore to fully upgrade all the stores. We finished it with the four stores at levels 4/5/4/1 (off/health/def/combo), and I think we found all the ore. The movement speed bonus from the health merchant might be the most valuable upgrade in the game. I'm not sure we could have got through the second boss without it. We actually tried a few times, and then backed off to town to spend the money we had. Upgrading movement speed made him much easier. This time we switched and my wife was the priest. We aren't good enough to get through either campaign without one of us being the priest. I'm sure there are lords out there who can, but it ain't us.

I had seen that said several times, but hadn't actually gone to confirm it. And yep, that does seem to be the case. The color scheme certainly looks believable, and part of the whole meme was trying to specifically get those colors associated with rape. Not going to link anything, but just google "picoolo rape vegeta gif" and you'll find it.

We got through the original campaign yesterday. Continued to be loads of fun until the end. My only real complaint in the general design is that the levels get a bit large late game, particularly with having to backtrack to get some treasure rooms. It's pretty common to find a switch, hit it, have no idea what it changed, and then have to just run around the level until you found something. We ultimately used a guide to find a couple of the secrets in the last Act, as we just didn't want to spend 20 minutes running around levels. Then we immediately started the expansion. And, I think I like it even more than the original campaign. The levels feel better designed, and there hasn't been as much backtracking so far (we've competed 4 levels). It changes things up some, more than I expected. Fewer doors (no bronze doors at all). More little hidden areas behind broken walls, but fewer switch puzzles. More inventive and evil traps (which I like). Instead of finding merchants in the dungeon, you have a hub you can warp back to from each level. You find ore that you can give to merchants to upgrade their store level, so you decide what upgrades you want access to earliest. Overall, I'd say they learned a lot from designing the original campaign, and it shows in the expansion. Fuck the first boss of the expansion though. That shit is terrible. Like, bad enough I'd expect it to be patched to be made easier, because it is a nightmare.

Yep, I'm the same, got through the first area where you can have combat, and so far am very happy with what it is.

Congrats Miffy!