Gwardinen

Actually I think he might have used the semicolon there because he was doing a comma separated list, and a semicolon is sometimes used as a kind of nested comma in a comma separated list to distinguish that this is still a discrete item that just happens to have a pause in it.

I'm curious about that story of the ravens in the tree. I'd like to know if it actually happened, and if so, who did it? Did they put the ravens on their own tree, did someone else actually do it, and if so was it to raise their credibility or was it actually some sort of aggressive action? If it was aggressive, who the hell did it? Do they live in some place that is actually split across factions of Christians who believe in the occult and pagans who believe in the occult? Genuinely interested by the idea that there might be some kind of dark fantasy town somewhere.

You may be thinking of the end of a Game of Thrones, I think it was, in which There may be another similar instance but I can't really remember. I feel like I'd probably benefit from a re-read of the Ice and Fire books, but I don't think I have the time, energy or patience. Maybe when the next book is near.

Yeah, I think it is the texture size. I presume it's like changing the textures to 8k as we discussed earlier in the thread. Vsync annoys me a little, because my drivers apparently don't support smart vsync (though I'm using the latest nVidia beta drivers so if mine don't, whose do?) so it just switches itself off again if I turn it to smart. I don't really want to turn it straight on because I'm worried about the performance impact, but you're right, the screen tearing in Rage is atrocious, so I'll probably end up doing so anyway.

Supposedly the game has now been patched to fix some technical issues and add at least a few more graphical options.

Yeah, you don't even need to press fire. However, it is not an instant attack, it takes a second or do after beginning to hold down B for you to actually be in the state that the game recognises as "able to chainsaw dudes". So if you get shot or hit in that timespan you're probably boned. As Sno said, its primary use is for catching people off guard or for charging at them from an angle or at a time during which they can't do much damage to you. If they're already within melee distance, doing a standard melee with a shotgun or just shooting them as you back off is probably a better bet. The trouble with identifying friend from foe and foe from scenery was definitely a concern in the first game. It got a little better in the second and significantly better in the third, particularly due to how you can now hold down LB and it'll colour shift enemies and allies a bit while leeching the colour from the environment.

Mostly agreed, though I think a Game of Thrones is definitely better than a Clash of Kings. Whether that's just because it's the introduction to this world and Martin's style I don't know, but I'm pretty sure I enjoyed it more for whatever reason. Also, while it didn't particularly bother me, I know other people have sometimes had a lot of trouble with a Clash of Kings due to its heavy focus on war. It seems like the second book often culls a lot of the people who enjoyed the first, leaving only the fairly hardcore adherents of the series.

Regarding classes; how are you guys finding yours? I'm still debating what to make when I play it. Currently mostly considering Knight or Bandit as they seem the easiest. Pyromancer is supposedly very strong early game but then becomes progressively harder, has that been your experience at all Sully? Knight is obviously strong by way of having so much armour, whereas the Bandit is a little flimsier but has high starting HP and I think moves faster than the Knight, which should make dodging easier.

Yeah, I'm aware of the basics of many of these systems and never even mentioned the word "multiplayer". That said, thanks for replying as your first post just freaked me out because out of context it seemed like those were the only two experiences you had with the online systems and I was worried they were much less important than I'd hoped. I'm glad to hear you've actually experienced a lot more of it. As for the renting, I don't intend to really play it "on a deadline", I have no intention of trying to finish Dark Souls within a rental period. Truth be told I don't really have any intention of finishing Dark Souls at all, which is kind of why I'm thinking rental. I want to play this game, want to experience its uniqueness, but I'm relatively sure that I'll have a set limit of how much of it I can handle while retaining any sense of fun so that's why I'm not going to buy it.

Twenty to thirty hours in you've only been invaded twice? Have you been a white or black phantom in anyone else's world? Have you summoned in any other players to help with bosses? Half the reason I'm considering renting (probably don't hate myself enough to buy it) this game is the interesting online systems, so I'm hoping they're a bit more involved than a couple of instances over thirty hours.

Apparently the lack of quality in textures might be to do with id Tech 5's auto-optimisation. Chances are with that machine (same GPU as me, internet high five etc.) you can run better textures, but the game engine chooses not to let you have them. There are already people working on config files that let you force certain levels of textures, at which point you'll need to do benchmarking to see if they actually run well. Be nice if a PC tech company allowed some video options natively, huh?

Yeah, I installed beta drivers for this game, and I'm on nVidia, which is supposedly better for it. This and Battlefield 3 have more or less demanded beta drivers to run at their best, it seems.

Apparently the manual is quite important, and clocks in at 64 pages, insane by today's standards! I found a copy here, though it isn't the greatest quality. You should still be able to make out the words enough to check it for things like Hero Quests though. Still considering buying but still not sure, footage of it suggests, as you said, that it's kind of a mass of menus without much information. I don't know if my ideal mobile game is one that I need to constantly refer to a manual for.

This is exactly the reason I still buy so many physical games, digital versions are just such a ripoff. I would actually rather buy digital at this point, I literally don't want to find the area of spacetime to store my game boxes anymore. Yet, I end up buying things physically anyway, because Steam and co. just won't give me a break on new releases.

That game sounds interesting, unfortunately it also seems weird enough that no one can really give me a good idea of what it is. Since it's £7 (€8, $11) I don't really want to invest so much in something I don't understand.

Since the Wire was brought up again recently, has anyone watched David Simon's new show, Treme? I'm curious about it primarily because of that connection but I don't know if I want to jump right in based solely on his involvement, so I'd love to hear opinions.

I think id has kind of experienced the Molyneux effect here. Since Rage has been so long in coming, and every time it has been shown the focus has been on its technical brilliance, people kind of expected it to be some sort of shining example of graphics, AI and optimisation. Add in the fact that QuakeCon happened recently and that John Carmack gave quite an interesting keynote regarding Rage's technical systems, and I think the hype for all those facets of the game was pretty high. As it turns out, the reality is that, like most things produced by tech companies, Rage is a mixture of impressive new ways of doing things and complete blindness to established, working methods. Those things are fairly obviously two sides of the same coin, and they result in really cool things, such as the fact that you don't really need to optimise Rage at all for your system as it will figure out how to make itself run at 60FPS while looking the best it can, and really stupid things, such as the fact that you CAN'T optimise Rage at all for your system since your options are limited to resolution, antialiasing and whether to enable a completely unexplained (by the game) feature called GPU Transcoding. Add in the fact that it doesn't seem like id paid much attention to the AMD GPUs (all the really major instances of texture pop-in and such seem to be coming from them) and that it doesn't seem to care that some of us would rather have stability than prettiness in specific places. What I mean by this is that there are instances in which Rage will decide to allow certain things, such as texture loading time (hence all the pop-in) and pretty major screen tearing, in order to get what it wants out of its own engine. That's a peculiarly "tech company" thing to do, sacrifice basic expectations for some kind of grand vision, but the real crime here is that even PC users have no choice in the matter. Due to the aforementioned lack of options, there isn't so much as a choice whether to allow this deliberate priority shifting, let alone to enable a fundamental option such as vsync. None of this is really all that surprising, when you consider the sort of people that run id, but it's pretty weird within the industry today. Perhaps it's just because Rage has been in development for so long that people have forgotten what kind of a company id is, and perhaps it's because Rage has been in development for so long that id hasn't noticed what kind of industry video games exist in now. /weird tech shit The game isn't bad, it's an id shooter with open spaces and vehicles. The shooting mechanics themselves are quite fun, and the sound and feel of the weapons are fantastic. The animations on the enemies are also pretty great, though the AI is standard for shooters in this day and age, there's nothing special about it as seemed to be the implication from coverage in the past. The story is adequate so far, but the voice acting is pretty good so that makes the dialogue seem a little better.

Precisely my experience. Nothing about it bothered me but I lost interest in it almost immediately.

Is it even possible to non-lethally take those guys out? I'm sure I tried a takedown on someone during the tutorial section and nothing happened.

This is me.

I just got this through the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle. My username is Gwardinen, and I think I selected UK3, though I don't know how much that matters. Is anyone else still playing? I'd love to give multiplayer a go.

I'm using Origin (bleh, by the way) to download and install the beta right now. I think my Origin name is Gwardinen, but who knows? I believe I can also be found through my Live username of Lord Tydeus or my PSN username of Gwardinen. Not totally sure. Let me know if people are going to be doing Thumbs Battlefield stuff, as I'm really curious about whether this game is going to be worth getting.

So I got a call today telling me that my new computer will be arriving tomorrow, awesome, right? Yes it is, and furthermore I'll be getting a free copy of Arkham City with it. Even more awesome? Yes it is! What is not awesome is that the guy told me the PC version of Arkham City has now been delayed to November. A quick internet search reveals he is correct. I would link to the press release but there's no point, that's literally all it says, Arkham City PC is delayed until "November" and no reason is given. I am not Batman.

Mine's Gwardinen. Surprisingly.

I'm not usually the kind to ask for this, but could someone read that and tell me whether it's worthwhile? Tim Rogers has disappointed me in the past and his pieces are so sprawling that it's a genuine investment to get all the way through them, an investment that has sometimes failed to pay off for me.