Raven10

@believer258: My issue with both random encounters and turn based battles is the amount of time it can take to just get from point A to point B. As a kid spending a dozen hours just getting to a quest location sounds awesome because you are a kid and you get like five games a year if you are lucky. But as an adult with a Steam library of over 300 games and things to do other than play video games an RPG that just lets me get from point A to point B quickly is pretty much a requirement. And the other element that I think defines Might and Magic games, the requirement to find a trainer to level up, just makes having to travel the world fighting turn based battles all the more frustrating. With the system from VI, VII, and VIII you could go turn based when you really needed to strategize during a tough encounter, but if you just wanted to get somewhere quick and you were a dozen levels higher than the enemies in the area you could just walk past them all and take the handful of damage you would receive from their hits. Or if you were trying to get somewhere outdoors you could just fly there and assuming a lack of flying creatures you wouldn't have to worry about combat at all. Remove those options and you are left with a game where you have to fight every encounter regardless of how pointless.

One of my favorite things about modern MMO's and some JRPG's is how enemies that are way lower level than you will just flee when they see you. It's not that I don't like strategic encounters. It's just that as an adult you learn that time is valuable and wasting dozens of hours fighting level one creatures to get back to a town to turn in a quest is not how I personally want to spend my gaming time.

@believer258: Might and Magic X isn't real time is it? I seem to remember reading that. As a fan of Might and Magic VI and VII I ended up not getting X mainly because I really enjoyed being able to swap between real time and turn based combat. It gave you the best of both worlds. Also those games let you fly which was my single favorite part of them. I haven't heard anything about flying in Might and Magic X. I always thought one of the great tragedies of The Elder Scrolls last generation was how Bethesda had to make cities separate from the world map which meant no more flying. I'm probably the only person in the world who finds the lack of flight in modern RPG's so tragic, but I always loved flying around the open worlds of the late 90's/early 00's RPG's.

So I have noticed a distinct lack of anyone talking about this game whatsoever so I thought I would take it upon myself to inform those who maybe don't check the Steam new releases page on a daily basis that Legend of Grimrock 2 has in fact been released. Just the other day I was wondering to myself what happened to that game and low and behold a week later it pops up on Steam with nary a hint of a marketing push. I haven't tried it yet, but the sole review I could find (on Rock Paper Shotgun) thought it was incredible. So I guess if you are one of those people who enjoyed the first game and hoped the sequel would involve a lot more of what made the first game great then this is the game for you. Massive outdoor areas as well as multiple dungeons. Dozens of new enemies. More varied and more complex puzzles. Just basically more of everything. At least according to RPS and the game's Steam page. Strange to see almost no previews, only a single trailer, and absolutely no buzz around this.

@hailinel: @naoiko: I wasn't expecting any votes for Valkyrie Profile, much less two. It's a personal favorite of mine as well, despite never managing to get the "good" ending. I even printed out a guide once to walk me through it but still couldn't manage it. I have it on PSP still. Maybe I should go back to it with the aid of life experience and give it another go. I have both the sequels but I always wanted to finish the original before I got into them and thus both have been sitting unopened on my shelf for like a decade now.

@billymaysrip - I've seen that War and Peace version as well at the Gene Siskel Center in Chicago. Definitely one of the more unique movie experiences I've had. Not sure I would say it was a great film, but the novelty of seeing the entirety of War and Peace adapted to film was definitely a one of a kind thing.

@fredchuckdave - We might have but Rorie said in the new forum rules that he would prefer we duplicate topics over necro-ing threads that are months or years old. So I'm just trying to follow the new rules.

@glottery: Now that you mention it, I would love to be able to experience Half Life 2 again for the first time. I didn't even think of that when writing this but outside of Bioshock that might actually be my top choice.

@sparky_buzzsaw: I had a feeling that was going to be one of the first games mentioned. I think for quite a few people that was a defining game for them.

@Everyone Else: I am surprised by the lack of Nintendo titles. Seems we have a lot of RPG fans around here. I have to say that Morrowind for me was a super cool thing to experience at the time, as was KOTOR and Mass Effect later on. Not a huge Final Fantasy fan but I can imagine that some of those story beats would hit a lot of kids/teens quite hard. And after listening to Dan and Brad talk about MGS2 the other day I really wish I had played it when it came out not a decade later.

So I recently got my Dad into the TV show Arrow. Hold on if you don't watch the show. This is leading into something game related. So getting him into it meant I had to rewatch the first season and be reminded of how awful it got for the middle 10 episodes or so. Of all the terrible melodramatic and overly romantic lines spewed during those horrible episodes one line has always stuck with me. In episode seven Tommy Merilyn says this while on a date with Meryl

Tommy: I read this article by a film critic once who said, if he could have one wish, it would be to watch his favorite movie again for the first time.

It made me start thinking about movies or games or books or songs/albums I wish I could experience again for the first time. For me the game would be without a doubt Bioshock. The awe of the initial opening sequence, the shocking world of Rapture, and a couple of the greatest twists in gaming history make it an easy choice. Looking further back, in the PS2/Xbox generation I would love to play Ninja Gaiden again for the first time. For the PS1/N64 I'd have a tough time choosing in part because even playing a game like Ocarina of Time for the first time right now would not be especially impressive in this day and age.

I have a handful of movie choices you can read about below but if you aren't interested the question is this: if you could play any game again for the first time what would it be and why? I think the choice depends a lot on whether you say you are playing it having played everything that has come out since, or if you were playing it as you were playing it the day it came out. Feel free to choose whichever interpretation you want, as like I said it is all but impossible to be too impressed by things like any Mario game or the early Metal Gear Solid games when you have modern games to compare them to.

MOVIE TALK BELOW:

As far as movies go I think the question is easier to answer as movies have been technically proficient at telling stories for 80+ years now. For me I would love to see A Beautiful Mind again for the first time. Such an awesome twist and one of the greatest performances in the history of film. Another choice would be A Clockwork Orange, or really any Kubrick movie. To see that level of mastery for the first time again would be an honor. A third choice that maybe wouldn't be as common would be Picnic at Hanging Rock. Not because the film has some amazing twist ending, or because it was an excellent example of any specific part of the filmmaking process, but because it captures a specific tone and place in my mind better than any film before or since. And my last choice would be seeing Pan's Labyrinth for the first time again, just to be able to capture the brilliance of every aspect of that film.

So what about you guys? What game, or movie, or any other piece of media really would you love to be able to experience again for the very first time?

Sounds good. In light of recent events I think the rules need to be as clear as possible. As always, good work @rorie.

@conmulligan: The CPU can be a limitation and often will be this generation as the CPU's are far less powerful than the GPU's. That said, the PS4 GPU has compute cores built in that could (and have in several cases) lift the load from the CPU. And the update to DX12 next year will be a massive boon on that front as DX11 tends to cause major CPU bottlenecks right now in addition to wasting a huge number of CPU resources. That said, especially in cases like Assassin's Creed where there is a lot of AI going on, CPU will definitely be a limiting factor. AI, though, is also the type of thing that can be programmed in multiple ways, and finding ways to get the same level of intelligence with less computations is going to be one of the big challenges for games that want a lot of complex NPC's on screen.

It depends where the bottleneck is. A higher resolution is going to effect several different parts of the engine to a different degree. The most obvious is the memory consumption and the much higher bandwidth of the PS4 VRAM is what is usually letting developers push that extra resolution. But to do that the memory has to be the only bottleneck. It takes more processing power from the GPU to render at a higher resolution as well, so if the developer was hitting another bottleneck then they might not have had the spare power to render the additional resolution. The core issue with the Xbox One from a resolution standpoint is its DDR3 RAM. It just doesn't have the bandwidth to push that many texture maps out at that resolution. It has certain advantages as well mind you, specifically in regards to getting data to and from the CPU. But the bloat in DX11 is causing too many CPU bottlenecks which is limiting what should be the Xbox One's big advantage over the PS4. It has a faster CPU with more responsive RAM. Regardless, there is nothing Microsoft can do from an optimization standpoint to fix their problem. The RAM will always be a major limitation. They might be able to mitigate the issue over time by lowering the RAM costs of the OS, but it will be up to developers to make good use of the system's ERAM and to find smart ways to compress their textures if they want to overcome most of the deficit. In the end, though, the PS4 simply has so much more bandwidth that there will never be platform parity unless developers hit bottlenecks in the processing areas that are limited equally on both systems, which may or may not be the case with AC Unity.

Also worth mentioning, the Xbox was a good 5 or 10x more powerful than the PS2. Unlike previous generations and the generations since, the Xbox was simply the most powerful system on the market in every regard. Just using the Playstation systems as examples, in the PS1 days the N64 had less RAM but more GPU power. Plus its cartridges could hold less space but could load data faster. The PS3 had a more powerful CPU than the 360, but a less powerful GPU. Plus it had split RAM instead of unified RAM which also caused major issues. And now the PS4 has the Xbox One beat in almost every regard, but on a hardware level Microsoft has a faster CPU with more responsive RAM. If their OS wasn't so bloated and DX11 so power consuming they would at least in theory have an advantage there that would require developers to get creative with the PS3's GPU compute cores. But the Xbox had a faster CPU, more powerful GPU, more and faster RAM, and support for surround sound systems. And the GPU also supported several features that the PS2 and Gamecube GPU's didn't support like dynamic lighting and shadows. Things that were incredibly difficult, if not impossible to fake or get around. The PS4 is maybe 25% more powerful than the Xbox One at a hardware level. Compared to the battle between the Xbox and PS2 (to put it in percents the Xbox was something like 1000% more powerful than the PS2) it doesn't compare.

I almost never actually cry. Like ever during any part of life. I teared up slightly when Tali's father died in Mass Effect and at a couple different points in The Walking Dead, but I definitely didn't cry during Red Dead, Brothers, MGS3, or Bioshock Infinite (though I haven't played Episode 2 of Burial at Sea yet). I did nearly break down during the intro of The Last of Us but the only game I can say I truly shed a tear for would be To The Moon. There were several moments in that game that brought me to tears which is quite impressive considering, like I said, I don't cry. To give people a sense of how hard it is to make me actually shed tears here are a list of things I did not cry over:

1. The death of my grandmother who I was very close to

2. The death of my cat who I rescued from a shelter and probably loved more than anything in the world

3. Any movie ever. I got some tears of joy when Harvey won the major vote in Milk, and a couple other times I teared up during truly happy scenes, but I don't think I can think of a time I actually cried full at a movie.especially for a tragic event. I'll occasionally tear up during really, really, sad sequences but never full on crying.

4. The end of Where The Red Fern Grows

I should mention that I have been on anti-depressants for most of my life which makes getting sad about anything really quite difficult even if I don't take them for a long period of time and makes it all but impossible to feel the overwhelming sadness that would cause one to cry.

So when I say that I cried, like actual tears coming down my face, (not sobbing tears mind you but there was at least one or two tears on my face) during more than one sequence of To The Moon, I think I can safely say that they are some of the most powerful moments in fiction of any sort.

You've gotten plenty of answers, but I'll just agree that your best bet is to contact either Rorie or Patrick via PM and/or on Twitter. Keep it short and sweet and remember that Patrick is the only full time news editor at the site so unless you have something that one of the editors can physically play, or some something you think Patrick would take the time to write a feature about I would maybe hold off and try for coverage on sites more focused on news, or for coverage on smaller sites that are hungry for content. Good luck, duder!