Ever turned off a PC game's HUD via console command? The perceived increase in image quality is astounding. So much unneeded 'noise' disappears instantly.
 
Online multiplayer games are particularly guilty of cluttering up the centerscreen with lots of irrelevant information like nametags. Yes, nametags can be useful for communication, but aren't really.  Imagine if a game automatically assigns you a color and a number for each match. Let's say in Battlefield 3, every squad gets assigned a color and the numbers 1 through 4. Instead of an obstructive nametag, all that remains in the HUD is a colored number. 'Red 4, tank coming up behind you.' So much cleaner than saying 'xxXButtMuncherXxx...', and just imagine how much cleaner the picture will show, being clear of blocky nametags. Watch the latest Medal of Honor Warfighter trailer, and tell me they shouldn't throw out their nametags for a more elegant solution, like the one I described. The game's HUD in general is an obstructive eyesore - it gets in the way of Frostbite 2's beauty.
 
  

Since BF:BC 1, I'm a huge Battlefield fan. I liked BF since BF1942, but BF:BC 1 made me into a believer. While I still love Battlefield, I hate so many design particulars of BF3, my dismay and frustration and anger often feels sickening.

• General Lack of Visibility (Color Desaturation, Blinding Lights, Overly Dark Shadows, Too Noisy Picture)
• General Lack of Visual Feedback (Lacking/Inconsistent Muzzleflash, Lacking/Inconsistent Tracers/Vapor Trails - every Kit being allowed to go 'Stealth' does amplify this issue further)
• General Lack of Audio Feedback (Most Prevalent Example are what I call 'Stealth Tanks' - every Kit being allowed to go 'Stealth' does amplify this issue further)
• Hate all Design/Mechanics Involving Actively Impairing Visibility and Control (Tactical Flashlight, Laserpointer, Suppression Blur, Suppression Deviation, Random Bullet Deviation)
• Hate Prone Position (Badly Implemented, Players Clipping Into Walls, Looking Unnatural or like Corpses, Favors Camping Playstyles, Further Reduces Visibility)
• Hate all Lock-On Warfare and Cooldown Timer Based Defensive Measures
• Hate Indirect Gadgets, such as Mortar, Claymore, MAV, SOFLAM - pretty much all BF3-specific gadgetry.
• Hate the high Movement Speed (doesn't mesh well with the tactical nature of Battlefield, favoring twich over tactis)
• Hate BF3's Ballistics. Not enough recoil. Too high random deviation, kicks in too late - making high ROF weapons feel too powerful). Too fast projectiles across the board. Too low TTK. Reactive survival almost never occurs.
• Hate Auto 2D-Audio Spotting
• Hate the UI and HUD (the UI for being not-well-thought-out, and the HUD for overlapping and giving me misinformation - Silhouetting would do a much better job)
• BF3 reintroduced 64 players. This larger scale doesn't do anything for me (opposed to what I believed before its release). I think the sweetspot scalewise is 24-32 players. Enough to bring an exciting theater of war to life, small enough to allow singular players to be instrumental. I believe Battlefield is at its best, when produced and balanced with such a scale in mind, rather than building it around 64+ players.

These reasons make BF3 my least favorite iteration of Battlefield to date. I still love Battlefield, but my love is strained and running thin.

I want clarity and control of my videogames. BF3 does its best to take that away.

All the gushing on the interwebs about the Avengers flick made me foray deep into the world of man, and I finally saw a movie in 3D.

Odd sensation, the 3D experience. Took my brains about 20 minutes to calibrate to the input the silverscreen fed it, before the frequent double vision stopped and the semi-headache cleared. Then an odd yet awesome sense of crystal clarity set in, as well as a kind of overblown pop-up book type of depth perception (fit very well with the subject matter at hand).

Dunno where I stand on it. I'd love to watch a whole bunch of movies in 3D and fully adapt to it, to form a conclusive opinion. How's it for you moviegoing guys? Does the oddness ever completely stop? Did you jump and buy a 3D homecinema setup?

I mean I'm one 3D screen away from watching 3D Blurays on my PS3... it's just... odd yet awesome, and it's completely inconclusive if I'm into 3D or not.

Been getting back into SSX the last couple of days. What stood out to me most was, how many tracks feel half assed. Like something that's not been professionally designed and playtested and polished. Barely modified randomly generated tracks. Most productions mock up a tonne of levels for their game, and cut everything that's not living up to 'their' standard, and only produce in earnest the best concepts. A shit level in SSX is simply labeled a 'Survival Level' or something.

As a semi-compulsive somewhat-completionist, when I get hung up on doing something unfun in SSX, it can be hours spent on crap filler content. The dillution of quality content and game experience is sad. I'd rather spend 5 times more time on brilliant tracks like Serenity and Bulldog, than waste time on butt-fuggly and unpolished turds as found on many a mountain range all around the globe.

A lot less crap and some more gold nuggets, that'd be awesome. If only I knew good tracks from bad ones by their names. Too often I spend big coin on some global event, just to find out that it's a shit track and I don't really enjoy my stay there. Haven't quite learned the names of the 50+ tracks to know which ones are fun to play on the different types of events - respectively which ones are completely unfun, unpolished turds.

SSX has A LOT of content. Much of which is brilliant. If you'd cut out all the crap, that'd make SSX consistently brillant, rather than flaky (but still good). I really hate that it's up to me to make it so. Why do I have to sift through a tonne of crap to find the (plentyful) nuggets of brilliance I enjoy so much? Isn't that the gaming industy professional's job?

Thanks for 25'000$ Worth of Abuse - Dirtbags!

So I'm almost lvl 700 in ME3's coop mode. It's my first horde mode coop online multiplayer I've gotten into big time. Guess that explains why I'm still digging it so much. It's a pretty fresh mode for me still, and I enjoy the hell out of it. Another hell, whilst not completely detrimental to the experience (there's some sweetness to this poison), is the pure RNG & redundant rewards the booster packs so frequently give me. It's like Bioware flipping me the bird, for being the dumb asshole that I am, so easily duped by shit-tastic gamedesign - it's frankly okay to be ridiculed for it.

Like I said, I'm like lvl 700 now, and I still got 9 weapons to unlock. 6 legitimate N7 ultra rares and 3 phoney ones from the 'commendation packs'. There's still some character customizations to unlock (hell - I got my 'last to unlock' race/class combination at like lvl 625), some weapon modifactions to upgrade, some equipment pools to increase, some weapons to lvl-up - much of which I don't care for one bit. At least that would be progress though. I want new weapons. I should have fucking earned them all by now - tenfold.

Let's say 50% of the gold unlocks currently are character/class cards. Last session I got 3 Asari Adepts out of 3 Spectre Packs, which give me nothing but XP. Essentially the most useless item I can ever get. Some people say Bioware is tracking my unlocks and 'designed the RNG' to accommodate for my tastes in playstyle. If that is the case, then Bioware thinks I love to get fucked up my unlubed asshole with a rusty pipe. I have a hard time putting into words the hatred I feel towards Bioware for designing the unlock scheme the way they did. What do they expect us players to do, to get access to the full suite of weapons? Pay up? I've earned like 100 Spectre Packs and I got 1 ultra rare out of them? There are 7 ultra rare weapons, each of which can be looted ten times? So to get all the weapons leveled up all the way, getting one ultra rare every 100 packs, I'd have to spend 25'000 USD?

FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE!
FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE!
FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE!
FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE!
FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE!
FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE!
FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE!
FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE!
FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE!
FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE!
FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE!
FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! FUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE!
 
tl/dr - at my unlock pace, if I'd pay IRL money, to unlock and lvl-up all weapons, I'd have to pay roughly 25'000 USD (160 Bioware Points are about 2,50$ in Switzerland). Such a thing is a disgrace in any game. Just thinking about it makes me want to quit EA/Bioware games forever. Sons of bitches - that's simply customer abuse. Hell - that kind of statistic would be too much for a Free2Play game, and I bloody paid 80$ for my copy of Mass Effect 3! FUUUUUUUCK YOU EA/BIOWARE! It's my new matra, in case you cannot say already.

Just finished up my playthrough of Kingdoms of Amalur : Reckoning. A little something over 102 hours for a 100% playthrough (or some close approximation of it). I had good to great fun throughout most of it, though it did overstay its welcome a bit.

• After about 80 hours I started to tire of the VOs. Whereas before I was able to successfully ignore all the redundancy and immerse myself, it just wore me down over time, being fed the same informations countless times over. That's when I started to 'click away' VOs frequently.
• Combat broke on multiple occassions due to too well optimized gear, respectively gamebreakingly overpowered itemization. I tried out crafting in the final zones too, which again was instantly gamebreaking with my survivability and crit rates getting stupid high and enemies getting pretty much one-shot.

Is it just me who did a 'content clear' playthrough and had like 100 hours less on their playtime than Big Huge Games advertised? Wasn't there an article about a 200 hours internal speedrun clicking away all dialogs? I bet 30-40 hours of my playtime was dialogs alone. Oh well - I got my money's worth and then some.

All things said. These are my lessons to having an enjoyable 'Clear KoA:R' experience. There's some really bad and boring sidequests, but I'd estimate it's about a 30/70 split. 70 in a 100 sidequests are actually worthwhile doing. If you can live with such odds, do them.

• Don't zone, before you're done with all quests.
• Don't craft.
• Don't minmax too much.
• In combat, do what's cool and stylish and challenge yourself to perform well, rather than just going for what works (because button mashing works).
• If you break combat, roll back to less optimized gear.
• Read all the books and notes.
• Engage in VOs and really listen and look - procedural facial animations and voice acting is much better than you'd think at first glance.
• Click away VO redundancies.

How about you guys? What's your playtime tally been? How did you like it overall? Your tips for prospective clear playthrough players?

With some effort, I managed to get a great gameplay experience out of KoA:R, albeit it did overstay its welcome at the end and combat and loot and crafting and consumables just lack the checks and balances to maintain a fun challenge throughout - though with 'combat roleplaying'/'pretending' the visceral 3rd person action mechanics managed to stay satisfying nonetheless. Good fun and a great value proposition.

What would you suggest Big Huge Games and 38 Studios do differently?

• Reduce exposition heavy characters to one per quest hub, eliminate all exposition redundancy
• Remove alchemy from crafting.
• Add a combo counter system.
• Link combo counter system to buffs previously found in alchemy, as well as to character progression systems.
• Add health/mana orb drops system (fallen enemies 'drop' instantly consumed health and mana orbs - as seen in God of War and Diablo 3)
• Link health/mana orb drops system to combo counter system and character progression.
• Fewer dungeons, but much much much bigger, larger, longer.
• Increase combat density in both overworld and dungeons.
• Reduce respawn timers for enemies significantly.
• Double average amount of combatants in any given combat encounter, add a 'spawn next wave' element to encounters more frequently, if not always.
• Add mounts for overworld travel, as a countermeasure to increased combat density and quick respawns.
• Remove blacksmithing from crafting.
• Expand on gear upgrade systems like Sagecrafting.
• Add 'Loot Pinata' effect to enemies.
• Add 'Area Looting' as seen in SW:TOR
• Add 'Loot Pinata' effect to breakable objects
• Add significant loot to breakable objects
• Link unique epic loot to boss encounters/quest rewards
• Deeper randomly generated loot with more affixes
• Increase competitive quality of green and blue loot drops

In short, skew the experience away from Elder Scrolls to being much more like a 3rd person Diablo game with a full set of RPG mechanics. Away from open world 'exploration' - towards becoming more a combat and dungeon and loot centric experience. Focus being on improving balance and increase challenge. And most importantly - increase pacing and flow of gameplay, respectively reduce downtime between combat.

What would you suggest?

Today, after a long wait, I finally got my boxed copy of Kingdoms of Amalur : Reckoning in the mail. Giddy with anticipation, I immediatly installed it to get some gaming done, before I take care of some chores. No such luck. Copy's gonna unlock on Origin sometime after midnight for its European release on Friday. God I hate it. Pirates have been playing this game since before the official US release. Well over a week before we Europeans even get activate our installations.

Needless to say, this ain't my first rodeo with EA's staggered release dates. Same deal with BF3 before that. I used a VPN to get around the activation and pass as a 'Virtual American' back then. Couldn't help myself and tried my hand again. Seems like EA has perfected its activation system to keep paying European customers from playing their games before local release day. I couldn't get the VPN service, nor the manual proxy method to work.

Really? You even have to be a stickler about it? Close up that loophole of VPNs and proxies, so that a semi-internet-literate person can't get past the arbitrary release date? Why? If I wasn't 'a gamer with morals', I'd be playing your game since over a week. Days before even paying American customers got to play it officially? What's the reasoning behind it? Some obscure UK retail practice?

Come on. If you can't give us a day and date global release in this age, you are simply doing it wrong. Everytime you make me arbitrarily wait on games I want to play, sometimes even make me sit infront of my computer with my boxed copy sitting next to me and my installation complete and half the world playing already - you tempt me to pirate the shit out of your product.

Once I start, I don't think'd be willing and able to stop. It looks way more convenient. Usually the files and cracks release days, sometimes even weeks early, distributed with higher download speeds than you do on your official service, no arbitrary bullshit delays because of regional release dates and so forth, no online activation, drm platform - zero hassle. That premium service? It comes for zilch, nada, gratis, free. By local law, it ain't even punishable.

I put up with a lot of your shit besides arbitrary regional release dates, because I want you guys to keep on making games for me, and because in general, the gaming industry does realize much better on the potential of the internet - distributing their product day and date worldwide. However - EA, with your staggered release day policy, instead of making a paying customer like me feel like a king, you make me look like yokel knucklehead getting duped - waiting on his royal majesty to grace me with a dump on the head, a week late.

Tell you what would happen, if you'd release your content with months or even years of delays (and sometimes not at all) depending on markets - like it happens with TV shows and some movies. Piracy would skyrocket way beyond what it is now. The potential of the internet is about the free flow of information globally. In case of an actual digitally distributable product, like videogames and tv shows, it has to be the goal to release the content simultaniously worldwide. On convenient all encompassing distribution platforms.

Push legislators worldwide to turn the internet into a global marketspace backed and protected by commonly agreed upon and locally enforced laws, and establish kind of a taxfree zone for global digital distribution. Whatever needs to be done. And for gods sake, if the reasoning for a staggered release is as flim-flam as yours, grow up and do global release dates. What a joke!

I recently dreamt-up some turnbased combat mechanics of matching and guessing actions the best you can. Like every encounter gets split into rounds. Depending on Initiative, the player characters and the NPCs each have 5+ actions to queue up every round. Depending on Combat Experience, the player learns to openly read more of the actions NPCs are going to make in that round. With his own list of offensive and defensive and support manouvers, the player has to mix and match his and his groups actions against the NPCs. Decide between various offensive and defensive and support manouvers with specific action point costs translating into effect durations or move wind-ups. If NPCs or player characters have more actions than the other, the excess in actions are frontloaded and go unopposed.
 
I like that core concept of matching and guessing multiple actions a lot. A turnbased system with an emphasis on timing. It's kinda reminiscent of the Grandia series, just way less linear. I'd love something like that in a WRPG. Presenting the action from the much more involved first person perspective - kinda like Fallout's VATS - leading to some rewardingly gorey slow-mo cinematic payoffs as the round plays out. Yes - strategic dismemberment and gore is a given.
 
  

I'm a bit torn on Skate 3. It captures Skateboarding extremely well. Trying to control the fickle nature of the board, attempting to make it do my volition's bidding with the flicking of my thumbs. I end up putting down a session marker at some spot and find myself doing the same 100 meters run a 100 times over before moving on. All the while my campaign doesn't progress at all. I get nothing out of it except the 'videogame skateboarding' I came for in the first place. The campaign structure doesn't mesh at all with the nature of the game.

Amped 3 has challenges and photographers and whatnot set-up seamlessly all over the world (if I remember correctly). Pretty much everywhere I go, there's something I can do to further my progress. Many of the campaign challenges trigger seamlessly as I ride past them. Progressing simply by playing. Skate 3 would be so much better if I'd progress with every landed trick, rather than having to seek out pre-determined and not-seamlessly-integrated challenges.

Oh well - it'll do 'til KoA:R is released next week and SSX is right around the corner, which I expect to have that amazing 'Hot Pursuit Autolog OCD' goodness to it, as advertised. Also looking forward to a less fickle, more immediate fun, arcade sports experience.