MuttersomeTaxicab

@mpgeist said:

Its a nervous tick, you answered your own question.

Wrong. Brad is clearly a robot. Since his internal processor is vastly overclocked to render the deep dulcet bass of his voice chip audible for mortal ears, he needs to vent excess heat occasionally or risk Red Ring of Brad. Touching the back of his head opens a small port along the small of his back to let some of that heat out.

That sounds utterly amazing. I fail to see where this is a bad thing.

@Totori said:

@MuttersomeTaxicab said:

I'm enjoying my time with Dragon's Dogma. That early mission where you're escorting a wagon was a lot of fun. Kinda chaotic, but I'm okay with that. Also, climbing on huge monsters is a great feeling. I totally get where people will not like the game and that's fine. For me, this falls in line with stuff like Dead Rising 2 and Dead Island, where there's some built in wonkiness, but there's typically enough of a hook that I have a small well of good will. Sometimes it'll run dry and I need to take a break from the game, but it always replenishes.

So it's a game with a special kind of taste, that you want from time to time but not every day?

Yeah, that's an excellent way to put it.

@FunExplosions said:

This game looks really cool. Patrick's whole notion of every fantasy game trying to imitate The Elder Scrolls is so damn wrong. It really shows that he's only played a couple fantasy games; I just wish he'd make the connection.

I don't know that he's necessarily positing that every fantasy game is trying to imitate the Elder Scrolls, but I don't know a single company that doesn't want the success of Skyrim, and I can't fathom a company in the business of making fantasy RPGs that didn't look real long and hard at what Skyrim was doing. I'm pretty sure he's able to recognize that Skyrim came out six months ago, too, so it's not like Capcom played that game and said "LET'S DO THIS BUT DO COMBAT BETTER" and then shipped this game six months later. In many, many ways, this feels like an attempt to make a more Western-friendly Monster Hunter. But ultimately, the sad fact is that there aren't a lot of mainstream fantasy action RPGs in recent memory that fall along these lines, so yeah, it's hard to fault him for trotting out the inevitable (and pretty apt) Dark Souls and Skyrim comparisons because that's what a casual reader is probably going to recognize.

I found a single legendary on Act 1 of Nightmare mode. It was a set of knuckles for the Monk, so not super helpful for a Witch Doctor, though, a buddy I was playing co-op with found legendary gauntlets for my Witch Doctor, so that was cool.

I'm enjoying my time with Dragon's Dogma. That early mission where you're escorting a wagon was a lot of fun. Kinda chaotic, but I'm okay with that. Also, climbing on huge monsters is a great feeling. I totally get where people will not like the game and that's fine. For me, this falls in line with stuff like Dead Rising 2 and Dead Island, where there's some built in wonkiness, but there's typically enough of a hook that I have a small well of good will. Sometimes it'll run dry and I need to take a break from the game, but it always replenishes.

@Sign said:

I always sell cheap, the way I see it, it is easy money and I have a fast turn around. I usually end up with several rares per session and they were starting to crowd my stash. If my choice is vendor for ~400 gold, salvage for a few mats I won't use or sell it on the AH for 5-8k, then the choice is easy. I could probably get more for the stuff I find but I'd rather it be gone fast and help someone else out. Also, when selling, always list a buyout price, as others have said in the thread the 2d wait can be brutal and wasteful, give people the option of getting the item immediately.

Yeah, adding in a reasonable buyout seems to be absolutely key to keeping your shit cycling. The worst is sitting on 9 auctions with zero bites and having to wait those two days before you can adjust pricing or sub something else in. Meanwhile, your stash just piles up with more and more crap.

@Jeust said:

So I think professional reviewers are partial and I don't trust them.

It's unrealistic to expect anyone to be purely objective about, well, anything. Getting up in arms about it seems kind of silly. A good reviewer will acknowledge their potential biases, either by explicitly stating them or by implicitly suggesting them through the tone of the review and their word choice. In cases where there's a chance of egregious conflict of interests, then ideally the reviewer has the good sense to hand the game off to someone who maybe doesn't have as many dogs in the fight.

What would it mean to have an impartial review? By this I mean someone writing to explicitly remove their personality and any chance that their personal interpretations would colour the review. If we assume that reviews are evaluative, then it's kind of impossible. If you want a list of the bullet points of things you can do in the game and what the game is about, then that's what the bullet points on the back of the box are there for. If you need someone to say whether the company actually pulled off the stuff they claim is in the game, then you have to at least partially trust the reviewer's judgement. It's more on you as a reader to figure out if your sensibilities match up with the reviewer and whether you trust their judgement. And, yeah, read reviews that you disagree with. I can go on any site and read about how great Diablo III is. I'm WAY more interested in that one review that's shouting down the others. I'll probably disagree with many of its points, but those kinds of reviews are always the most fascinating. At least until I get to the comments, then they're just saddening.

@alternate said:

Sexy prawns?

Oh christ. You broke the game for me. Now every pawn I make has to be named after a different crustacean.

@Tennmuerti said:

Or if you are a low level char for example high level Hell difficulty gems sell for dirt cheap, far cheaper then crafting them, and with no level restrictions you can put them on low level character. Spend 500g on a couple of socketed items at lvl 15 and put in a couple of Square Rubys, voila you have lvl 30 equiv dps at lvl 15 for next to nothing, everything just melts away.

This is a really smart idea. I just started a monk in hardcore - they have a separate stash and gold pool. First thing I did was just outright buy a couple solid rare fist weapons. I'm pretty sure they're both socketed, too. Will totally pick up some gems for 'em. Cuz, y'know. Hardcore.

@Panpipe: The economy is the biggest concern I have, and partly the reason why I started this thread. There really doesn't seem to be too many permanent cash sinks in this game. Like anybody else here, I barely buy anything from vendors (unless it's for achievement purposes) and I typically come across enough health potions that buying those isn't a significant sink. I don't know how far down the rabbit hole levelling up artisans goes, but I doubt that will occupy me for longer than a month or so, unless you can get them to the point where they're producing legendary items for vast sums of gold - and at that point, why even have an auction house? From what I've seen, the price of rares will probably drop a fair bit but yeah, anything worth really having will be expensive beyond reason unless Blizzard has already anticipated this stuf and has corrective measures in place. Taking 15% commission doesn't seem to be enough to offset gold auctions at very high levels, but who knows.