Bay 12 Games Forum

one thing I'm curious about: why is it mass effect's ending is so bad to you guys? I mean, I've seen them, but haven't played the game beyond one time at my friend's house, so it may be that I'm missing something, but it's been kind of annoying, I don't think the endings are as bad as people describe, but I can't help but feels it's because I haven't played it through.

Kilroy you might wanna spoiler that, I don't know if everyone has finished the game.

Why on earth is that hidden in the options menu and not just part of the UI? :S Seems like a really odd decision.

Excessive cherry-picked quoting

If you can't respond to someone without indivudually commenting on every sentance seperatly then please make it a numbered list so I don't have to go hunting through two posts to piece together what you're responding to and with. Especially when you cherry-pick which parts of sentances you want to respond to and leave the rest behind.

Anyway, finally got into the game (for a while, before it booted me for losing connection again ¬_¬). Got to level 3, unlocked an ability for LMB and one for RMB. Is there a way to rebind those? It seemed from the interface to be specifically bound to the button its set too... Which is kinda lame if it's true.

I really like the little monster lore things you get, and how they play while you carry on smashing zombies faces in. The combat in general feels much more visceral than D2. I was playing a barbarian, and it was pretty satisfying clickin on them dudes. I was surprised to see potions, as I'm sure there was an interview a while ago where they said potions had been removed. Definatly glad they're still in. The levels seem much less open and explore-y now though, which is lame.

If only it didn't have this horrible always-online DRM, I could actually give it a proper go!

So you disagree with me therefore I dont want to discuss anything and don't even know what I'm saying?

This statement that you made is saying "D2 was impossible to play unless you looked up strategy guides and leveling tables."  Which is demonstrably false. Sure you wouldn't be able to beat the harder difficulties without at least a fair understanding of how the game worked, but beating it on normal difficulty, or hard? Not as impossible a task as you seem to think.

I'm going to repost this, since this is a thing we do now? You're basically arguing that every difficulty for every game should be as easy for someone who's never played it before as for someone who has played through the game on the previous difficulties and has an intimate knowledge of how the game works. Normal difficulty is the standard one, which is where you learn how the game works, how to play, etc. Hell difficulty is deliberatly supposed to be extremely punishing. I say punishing rather than rewarding (even though it's both usually) because it punishes lack of knowledge and skill with lack of progress. It's not that they aren't relevant, and I never said that, it's that they aren't relevant concerning what you're complaining about. Maybe it's my fault for reading what you wrote at face value, and not filling in the bits you obviously meant to write but left out for some reason, like "D2 is the opposite; you look up a bunch of skills and figure out what works, and if you don't, you can't progress on the hardest difficulty ." (bolded the parts you forgot, i guess?)

If you honestly don't think games have been getting easier, on average, then I don't know how to respond. Ever see that video of the COD level that plays itself? How many racing games have rewind functions incase you mess up taking a corner? Again (as I said this before) I don't know if Diablo 3 is simplified or dumbed down or streamlined. I made no claims to that as I've still not been able to play the game. But as a general trend in gaming? Definatly. They don't call it "nintendo hard" because they had detailed quest logs and magic arrows that pointed your way to the glowing object while the A button flashes up on the screen to tell you how to interact with it.

"Sure you can drive your car to the shops and back, but you can't drive in the Gran Prix, so we're going to put a 30mph speed limit on that so anyone can do it! If driving in the Gran Prix isn't relevant to you then neither is anything because driving is easy and you're going to drive however you want anyway"

I disagree. Entirely. I think there have been overall changes in the direction of game design. Those changes are not "dumbing down", they're a different approach that prioritises different areas of game design. This is why I made the Godwin comparison: "dumbing down" is used as a buzzword/phrase/whatever, spouted by people who don't want to actually discuss anything, just find something to criticize, and they just keep on repeating it without even trying to consider what it actually means.

This would make sense if I actually said the game was dumbed down, or haven't been actively discussing the topic with you (without resorting to thinly veiled ad hominems, thank you), or haven't shown an awareness of what it means, or have repeated it outside of this discussion, or haven't had actuall things to criticise about the game itself and your arguement to which I was initially responding without needing to make things up.

I never once used a cookie cutter build in D2 and I did great through all the difficulties.  There were times I had to get help from a friend, but that's what made it more fun.

You are a liar. Noone has ever beaten D2 without at least taking the 4 year skill-tree 101 class at MIT, or the intro to clicking LMB studies course at Harvord!

So you're saying Hell difficulty was harder than normal, and required a better understanding of the game mechanics and how your chosen class played? I will not stand for it!

Stuff like skills not scaling properly with monster HP is just plain bad game design, and doesn't really have anything to do with how easy or difficult it was to build a character in D2. That isn't an arguement to streamline the leveling process, but an arguement to actually think about things and make sure skills aren't useless. ALL the skills should be usefull.

Right, but the other side of that argument is that, say, in D2's system, you had to be clued up on everything and do everything right or your character was utterly worthless. Would you prefer having to look up tables every time you want to check if something's viable and find out it probably isn't anyway, or just be able to experiment?

This statement that you made is saying "D2 was impossible to play unless you looked up strategy guides and leveling tables."  Which is demonstrably false. Sure you wouldn't be able to beat the harder difficulties without at least a fair understanding of how the game worked, but beating it on normal difficulty, or hard? Not as impossible a task as you seem to think.

"Sure you can drive your car to the shops and back, but you can't drive in the Gran Prix, so we're going to put a 30mph speed limit on that so anyone can do it!" Is a good metaphor to explain why I have a problem with this line of reasoning.

Disclaimer: Still haven't played the game as it still wont let me into singleplayer because server issues ¬_¬ So i dunno what the character advancement is actually like, but this arguement of why its ok to dumb things down (if they indeed are) irks me.

*Spend 5 minutes clicking the "play" button because it can't find the server for some reason to let me play a singleplayer game*

*Get it to work, play for 5 minutes, get booted to main menu because it lost connection, click play and it flashes up an error code*

Fuck this ¬_¬

I'm pretty sure WvWvW is based on your server for PVE, and it changes every fortnight. Servers that win WvWvW are paired up against other servers that win, losers against losers, so it all balances out, and then it switches when the fornight is up. I think the colours are just assaigned randomly to the three servers facing each other?