Also, the story advancement is just a typical small revenge story, just with a lot of steps to it.

By the way, for people who have played more, how was the mod community for Starcraft 2 so far?

The only significant mod I saw was that one early on where it was basically a MOBA with spaceships, and other high profile things like the MMO that had to change names.

[Spoiler]

You know, I wonder... (mid game small spoiler)

Spoiler for Hiden:

If the DLC mission will finally let us meet that witch coven that one of Daud's notes mentioned. Besides murdering the Empress, Daud and his men seemed to cleaning up the streets of all sorts of dangerous people.

Actually, the game is much more of a shooter than all other TR games, the platforming is there, but it's not the puzzle platforming of past TR games. There are some really small puzzle tombs, and the larger hub areas to grab collectables in, but most of it is shooting.

They kinda play up the survival and platforming early, but shooting takes the forefront quickly after, you'll see.

Yep, 20 missions, no choices, missions seem not as interesting as WoL either. Guess they're in pure milking mode.

CG movies are always nice, but good CG is so common nowadays, so many studios and games do it just as well as Blizzard. So now it all seems like padding.

That said, there are choices in WoL that affect the story in SC2, I'm not sure how much, I think it might be minor, but still interesting.

Should be easy enough to make your own on the side.

If anyone wants these, I can organize a group order for custom cut pieces. These really are just laser cut transparent neon acrylic with black acrylic bases, on a black acrylic board with laser etched details.

Costly to do a custom order, but the places that can make something like this custom are everywhere now.

Just whip up a template in illustrator and send the files to the cutter.

Force her to play it and make those decisions, she can't really judge properly without having played a good example.

Well, he did recently have to sell his castle, perhaps all that spending, and no actual money making has taken it's toll.

I have to admit, after watching let's plays of it, it's like a love letter to all 3 games.

The reason why it doesn't matter or cover the end is that in some ways, it's trying to make up for it by focusing on the characters you've grown to love. It's all about characters, along with all the minor and major things that helped establish Mass Effect as a series, those little and big details that people who play RPGs loved. Yes, it's a bit silly this is all happening while Earth is being annihilated, but honestly, if the world was ending, I'd be spending as much time with friends as I could.

But my stance on ME3 as a whole still stands, it's an ambivalent feeling where on one hand it really is a heartfelt, but on other, they throw it away just to try and go for a shock out of this world ending, from what I hear it was from one writer with a power trip. From most of ME3's campaign, to this DLC, it's clear the developers loved and knew what really made ME as a series popular, which is why so many also felt it when things ended up the way it did.

This DLC is expensive because they really did pack it with an amazing amount of character content. There's a lot of voicework, not just bit appearances, but well written character moments that walk the line between fanservice and good character development. And yes, there's lot of fanservice.

So, I was wrong. I'm recanting and I went and bought it, I had extra bioware points anyway and this was a good a place as any to spend them on considering I don't see myself buying anything else, and everything is origin anyways.

Still, missed having Emily Wong show up.

I didn't either, and I got pretty far into the original Space Hulk game.

Terminators are both veterans, and have heavier tanky armor.

There was a version of Space Hulk with different rules and a lot more armies, not just Space Marines vs Genestealers. I think is was called Space Crusade or something like that, and had rules for almost all 40K armies of the time.

The current version they're basing it off of is the latest GW rerelease, which was back to the original. The only thing besides basic genestealers is the broodlord.

Chaos Space Marines tend to be more poorly armed technologically, but make up for it with various chaos weaponry and augmentations.

I finished the game at 12 hours, that's with a lot of item collecting up until 1/2 of the way through the game where the story picks up and I rushed through it.

So a solid amount of gameplay, with a good deal more exploration to find everything.

I do know I want to go back and find all the documents, especially since I found a set of secret documents that hints at more interesting story to be developed later in the series.

Keep in mind, they only started doing these beta tests in response to how bad their editing was getting, and their community was reacting, before that, they knowingly sold us some broken products.

And errata pages only fix typos and small errors, big core systems that have problems are left alone.

But, it's a good plan to help outsource testing of the game and make sure they catch issues well ahead of time, which is the only reason why I'm interested in buying another FFG RPG book.

Heh, not sure they could make up for the horrible 2nd one.

Not surprised, what they had didn't look that good, and what they were trying to make seemed way out of their league.

I wonder if this would have gone over better if they had started with a stronger, more well defined art style, and a much more scaled back game.

And also a much lower goal.

The group of studios doing this are all headed up of a lot of good talent from the golden years of computer RPGs. This is the reason why people are so excited, and why there's so much cross advertising between them.

This is also one of the very few games I'd consider going with a higher tier kickstarter pledge, and that's only partly because I also get a copy of the Numenera pen and paper RPG along with it, since I missed out on that kickstarter and have no idea when that will come to market.

One interesting thing is that they sound like they'll allow you to go it alone in the game, or at least plan to.

Another thing I'm liking is the auto cover, somehow they made it work, probably because the AI was made to be a pretty poor shot overall, so being slightly off angle, they still give you the benefit of the doubt. Uncharted has always had issues with its cover system.

The Alan Wake style dodge/scramble is also works well.

I have a high end PC with a 7950, looks and runs great on ultimate detail. However, there's a few areas in the game that drop my FPS to next to nothing, so I go from solid and stable, to unplayable. It's weird, but all that means is i had to drop the detail down to medium for a chunk of the game, no big loss and it still looked great.

You can definitely see the design elements they pulled from other games. First there's the definitely Uncharted influence, but they definitely one up Uncharted in a few good ways. First is the hub areas that you come back to, and change over time, but there's a nice but of going back and exploring new stuff.

However, besides Lara, none of the other characters are as interesting as Uncharted's supporting cast. Traversal + Gunplay isn't as good as Uncharted though, you can't use your pistol everywhere, but considering the story is of a young inexperienced Lara, I think it kinda works despite the madness that happens later.

From what I've heard from podcasts, Time and Eternity is one of those really sleezy RPGs, probably should stay away unless you're used to those kind of games like the Atelier and Tonelico games.

Hmm... actually looks a lot like Dishonored, which isn't surprising, it's a good art style for this type of game. Definitely different, but with similar aesthetic stylization on a lot of aspects. I wonder if Dishonored's success had an effect on making sure the game was 1st person.

It being next gen, and thus using all the latest graphics tech is a good thing for the stealth genre. First of all, the latest graphics tech, such as the DX11 stuff, excels at lighting effects, especially the subtle things you can do with it, and subtle lighting is great for stealth (and horror) games.

Since they're targeting these new system specs, it means a bigger and more interesting city, and better AI, such as the AI they're describing that will intelligently hunt down Garret.

He seems to be getting more time as the overall plot ramps up, especially if this last episode is any indicator.

This is one of the few cases where I hope the publisher sues the crap out of the developer. Gearbox may have given us Borderlands 2, but they also gave us these two craptastic games, DNF and ACM. If this report is true, then Sega deserves a chunk of money back from Borderlands 2 profits.

And none of this surprises me actually, hanging around game developers, you hear a lot of similar stories, often with just as crazy outcomes.

Actually looks good.

But, still not buying it.

River Song makes her appearance, good to see her on a US show. I wonder if Barrowmore had some influence on the casting, or that their casting director just happens to be a fan and knows that people who watch will also be fans of Doctor Who.

WAH WAH WAH on the whole human enemies deal. Sorry, but the series was actually headed in that direction. It's just the handling of these specific human enemies (unintelligent cannon fodder) that was poor.

EA has reached the point where its own bloated weight works against its own success

Game or movie, I'm still excited.

If it's a movie, even if it's straight to video, it should be pretty cool. I suspect it'll be a 3D animation, but live action would be interesting as well.

If it's the sequel, great. Let's hope they learned some lessons in DE1.

GMG hands out Steam keys, just put those keys into Steam to start pre-loading.

Eh, console wars are fun.

But I suspect this coming generation of console wars is going to be a bit sillier since both consoles are going to have very similar hardware specs.

While I do think BC is important, I don't think it's that important in the long run. It's mainly a space saving measure.

I do believe that's the tail rotor of a zepplin.

A year into any next gen console's lifespan, you won't be playing older games.

I've been playing Gamecube, SNES, GBA, PS1 and PS2 games on and off, some rather recently.  I wouldn't say next gen kills the desire to play previous gen.

No, however, Are you playing NES games on your SNES, or Gamecube games on the Wii that much?

The reality is, I'd rather have cheaper hardware to buy, and keep my older hardware if I really want to play older games.

And the terrible ending with 4 buttons.

Edit: It's been 18 months since the game released. Just about time for the sequel to be announced.

Also just in time for it to be released on this year's new consoles. Hopefully it's on the new consoles so that the devs don't have to make as many gameplay and AI concessions.

A year into any next gen console's lifespan, you won't be playing older games.

Also, when was the last time you used CDs, except for old legacy devices such as an old car radio?

Free to play on the PC means that, barring titanic shifts on hardware and software achitecture, you'll have access to what you bought on the free to play game for as long as the service stays alive.

Buying it on something that's PS3 only, when the next hardware is already on its way this year means that not only is anything purchased now already obsolete, it also means that there's going to be a lot less active players on the PS3.

If anything, I really, really expect Planetside 2 to make the jump to PS4, since the PC-like hardware specs, larger memory, and better networking will actually allow MMO-like games to work.

I still think it's a good idea overall, but I think its a waste of resources at this point in the lifecycle unless they plan to bring it over to the PS4 somehow, which I doubt.

Interesting... however, I figured they might go with entirely new characters since the events in AC3.

I meant waited to do this for Uncharted 4 whenever it comes out.

People are less likely to invest in free to play purchases when they know that something upcoming is going to be a lot better, and the platform you're buying on will see a steady decline in the coming year.

This may be cheap and low risk, but doesn't mean it will make enough money, especially when the tone at the top is already focused on another platform.

For example, something like this may be a better option for Killzone Shadow Fall.

Not a bad idea. Although honestly they should have just waited to launch this on PS4.

Yep, no brainer. The ship sections of AC3 were surprisingly good, many have remarked it was good enough to be its own game.

I actually still listen to all the podcasters from those sites, on all the places they have ended up. So I'm really not missing anything.

(Response to a now deleted post)

Just because you can't think of a way for them to address this, doesn't mean they shouldn't have come up with a way to address it well. It's called game design, and it's their job to do so.

Off the cuff, I can think of various ways to do this, such as slowly changing up the animation and gameplay, such that early on her climbing, shooting, and other animations are slower, and clumsier. Finisher animations that they seem to have would also look more like accidental successes. Then by the end the animations and gameplay get up to more what is expected from an action hero.

They actually might already be doing a little bit of this from what I've seen in early videos, but it sounds like it wasn't as well folded into the gameplay, as such it doesn't reinforce the story quite as well.