Nals

Earth Dying.

Overpopulation has evolutionary triggers in place to be dealt with. It'll be a really dark part of human history, but starvation/wars/genocides are the natural human response to lack of resources/space/area. If/when population gets large enough, culls will start to happen. Culls inherently don't have to be built around negativity either, there just might not be enough food for everyone, so some people get to starve to death. It sucks, but it won't be much more then a whole bunch of really sad newspaper articles for most of the world.

If the Earth dies, we all die. We don't have extra Earth's lying around.

That's kind of the big problem with a lot of this stuff. Organized religion might do some really stupid stuff on it's way out, but it's also on it's way out. Religion won't hold much sway over the planet in around 100 years just because it's getting no new blood in. Lots of people might die, but it won't be a global catastrophe. Capitalism sucks, and the underclasses get the shaft constantly thanks to it, but again, once the old white folks die off, the younger more liberal groups will take power and start changing things, just like all major eras have occurred. And even then, this is a problem that only really affects maybe 20% of the human race, the rest of humanity is in even worse governmental conditions and is doing fine.

Outside of an external threat coming in like a super virus/aliens, the only real problem we have going forward is if we can't leave the planet within 500 million years ( because then the sun dies ), or if we ruin the planet to the point of inhospitably. And even then, if we cause another Ice Age and totally fuck over the planet, enough humans will survive to live through it, get to the other side, and then likely rebuild the human race/go through all the stuff we have/get to space well before the sun dies. We are kind of an annoyingly hard to kill species if you haven't noticed.

Hey if this means they finally bring Minecraft to Steam and add some Steam features, I'll dig it. I'm not sure how Microsoft can actually make a profit from this situation, but well, that seems to be the Microsoft mantra right now.

It's honestly fine.

The interface stuff is confusing at first, but you get used to it in about a day, then it becomes second nature. Or you can install Classic Shell upfront and just use that. Neither are very taxing.

Many games that were bugged on Win7 ( NWN Gold from GoG, SR2, the Sacred's ) work fine out of the box on Win8, since they fixed up those bugs.

If you are straddling the line on hardware, games will run slightly better on Win8. I do a ton of emulation, and running tests on the same machine, just with a switched OS gives a 10-15% boost in FPS/quality on the Win8 machine. Not a huge deal if you surpass requirements but could help on a Laptop situation.

The biggest "issue" people have/had with Win8 is it does ask you to try new things upfront. For individual people this is alright, we can take a bit of time to relearn things, or can modify the files to better suit us. Businesses can't, which is where the "failure" bits came from.

@korwin:

It's not like one of the benefits of being an Asgardian/wielder of Mjolnir established in the comics is near invulnerability to physical damage.

Or you know, the fact she's going to be fighting dudes who use martial arts/magic, not swords. This isn't an RPG character, it's a superhero who fights supervillains.

Bioware is no longer oldBioware. Most of the BG2 team was gone by Origins, and since DA/ME3 even more have left. It's Bioware in name only at this point.

Add in that their last two games have featured moments in player agency driven games where they removed player agency to tell a story, and I'm not sure they can pull off an RPG I want anymore. It doesn't help that the plot of Inquisition is that you are a literal angel sent by the fade/maker to fix the problems. Or that the core enemy is "demons from the sky bro!", rather then anything complex, like fixing the Demon Baby/Red Lyrium/Darkspawn/Political instability plotlines.

Ultimately though, my biggest issue is the gameplay just doesn't look fun. They've almost entirely removed isometric even on PC, in favor of the over the shoulder angle of DA2. From the E3 video, playing an Archer makes it a ME2/3 style TPS. And considering an open world is an ambitious task, I'm not sure they can pull it off with what, 2 years? What they are showing is not something I feel Bioware can actually pull off well with the resources they have/EA.

I enjoyed the Witcher for it's storytelling, and enjoyed Witcher 2 even more. I have a feeling I'll enjoy Witcher 3. CDProjecktRed has yet to let me down, and everything they've shown has been consistent with what I feel that studio can do.

I'm not going to write off Inquisition, I'd like it to be good because I want more RPGs. I'm just not going to buy it until it's on sale, and I get some opinions from people I trust.

@cerberus3dog: The Bean is copyrighted. If Ubisoft wanted to put it in their game, they'd have had to pay fairly exorbitant royalties for it.

@irvandus:

Hey man, my game looks exactly the same as those old trailers.

Then again I'm playing on PC Ultra, so of course it does, that's what those old trailers were.

As for the hacking, I use it constantly. I use camera jump/lures to clear missions, and managed to get every ctOS Base/Tower unlocked without ever even entering the restricted areas. My favorite was the one in Pawnee, since I had to plan out the guard with the personal cameras routine, then wander over nonchalantly on the sidewalk to throw a lure into the restricted zone to pull him closer to the objective. The only time I've ever really been forced into firefights is the Club/Criminal Convoy missions, and even then I usually abuse Blackouts/Explosions to clear a path to the guy I need to take out, who I then melee.

Those hacking options are still in place and work fine. Not sure if it's a games failing if you see a wealth of options and then just choose use gun on man.

Except she can't repair anything.

The Process won. The people of Cloudbank either died in their homes, or died in the mass grave to the east, where they waited for their end. Royce even says as you beat him that you are among the last of Cloudbanks citizens. This isn't something she can fix, and we are given no indication there are other survivors. Sure there might be, but at that point you are arguing ifs rather then whats, which does nothing for the story.

We saw what happened when she tried to repair Blue. Error. For all the power the Transistor offered, for everything it could do, for all it's godlike powers, it cannot bring back the dead. It couldn't fix Cloudbank. Red couldn't do anything to fix what started at the beginning of the game, outside of maybe rebuilding the city proper. But whats the point of living in a dead world with nobody else around you?

You say suicide is the selfish way out, and that's true of Earth. However Cloudbank isn't Earth, and they make sure to drive this home again, and again, and again. It's a place where the afterlife is known as the Country, and while it's a one way trip, you can apparently visit it fairly easily. Nobody worries about going to the Country, and it's apparently a nice enough place to live in. There is no heaven and hell for these people, just a return to the Country. Nobody in Cloudbank fears death, and the idea of an afterlife is so accepted among them the idea of suicide likely isn't that problematic either.

As Red says in the song, she's going to the Country with everyone else. Because that's a better alternative then "all becoming One.". Rather then become Processed, she'd rather live inside the Country/Transistor with Blue/everyone else that was integrated into the sword. And honestly? That sounds like a pretty happy ending considering the alternatives.

It's not the story of a woman who can't live without her man. It's the story of a woman who did absolutely everything she could to try and bring back the dead, and when she found out she couldn't fix anything, decided to join the rest of her friends in the sword rather then live alone in the world. It's a nihilistic story about the inevitability of death, rather then a happy go lucky love story.

Just because you don't like the story told doesn't make it poorly written/bad.

@kishinfoulux: Remember the indie gamejam a few months ago that blew up due to a marketing guy trying to force everyone to advertise for Mt. Dew/Doritos/Toyota? And how one reporter from inside the company was the one to write a scathing report on his own company calling them out for what they did, out of journalistic integrity? That's him.

So he knows how to write well, and like Jeff/Vinny he's got integrity.

Outside of that he's one of the ideas behind Red Pepper Gaming, which is less a Youtube Superstar thing, and more a "let's bring in major industry guys like Brad Muir, Greg Kasavin, or Jeff Green, and have them do a review while eating a hot pepper". While it's a little flawed in execution, it shows he's got oddball ideas and is willing to work outside of the norm.

I'd say he'd be a good fit, but I don't think he's done much camera work before.

I disagree.

This is a character driven story, unlike Bastion which was the story of a world. This is Red's story, from Red's perspective.

Red doesn't care about the Process. She doesn't care about the Camerata. She doesn't care what the Transistor is, or why the Spine makes it go crazy. She doesn't care about any of these questions you the player had. What she cares about is one thing, and that's if it's possible for her to resurrect the love of her life. That's it, that's her driving motivation from the word go.

Literally every bit of worldbuilding is built for this specific purpose. She take's Blue's jacket and wears it to remember him by, she talks to him through terminals, and holds the sword close when he's in trouble. The scene at her apartment and at the bathroom are almost flirty, scenes showing two lovers trying to catch a normal moment in a world gone to hell. Heck, just look at her reaction to what the Spine did to him, pure anger, followed by her telling him she was going to rip out it's heart for hurting him.

The story isn't about the Camerata or the Process. Having Royce stand on a pedestal and give you a monologue about how the Process are the builders of the city, and Blue fucked everything up wouldn't have helped the core narrative of the love story. That core story of love trying to survive in a nihilistic damned world is told very well if you pay attention to the basic stuff going forward. What you are saying is that you didn't like the core love story, and instead found the side stuff so much more interesting you considered that the main story, and are angry those questions are not getting answered.

Which is fine. If you don't like love stories that's fine, the side stuff is intriguing. But the answers to every single question you asked is either told by the main characters you meet, or can be implied from the terminals. It's not tied to the unlocks at all. All the unlocks teach you is that the Camerata are hunting the best and brightest ( plus those that get in their way ), and there are people in the sword. Those things are told by the basic game as well.

Oh yes, I forgot, the Grant/Royce bio's give you the motivation for the Camerata as well, but that's not a question you asked.