Also, for your own sanity's sake, change the FoV: http://borderlands.wikia.com/wiki/PC_Tweaks   It is set to a dreadfully low 70 (which is standard on consoles, and it feels more natural there as you sit further from the screen). Most PC shooters will have an FoV of around 90-100. 

I was at Eurogamer last week so got to play lots of new stuff, I enjoyed Playstation All Stars. And Merlin was pretty interesting, we picked up some extra swag and we are giving it away on our facebook page at the moment. We have a 2 three month playstation plus codes http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=275726379213417&set=a.244128165706572.54214.244122022373853&type=1&theater

That assassin's creed 3 poster would be awesome to have.

Originally Posted By Fnord (2 OCT 2012 6:17am)

Also, for your own sanity's sake, change the FoV: http://borderlands.wikia.com/wiki/PC_Tweaks   It is set to a dreadfully low 70 (which is standard on consoles, and it feels more natural there as you sit further from the screen). Most PC shooters will have an FoV of around 90-100. 

hmmm odd, it didn't bother me this time, although it usually does 

Anyway I gave up after a few more hours of frustration: boring missions, annoying enemies, dull environments and don't get me started on the automated saves, i hate it that they still exist in modern games 

I've been playing Civ V and Saint's row the third again, such marvels remind me that i shouldn't waste time on mediocre games 

Borderlands is a multiplayer game, if you don't have someone to play it with, then it really is not a all that fun. 

Oh, and have you got Gods & Kings yet? It adds quite a lot of content to the game, and if you can find it on a sale or a cheap boxed copy (or have a friend in the US who can buy it for half the price compared to what it is here in Europe and then send you the key...), then I would highly recommend it. 

Originally Posted By Stiler (3 OCT 2012 9:48am)

That assassin's creed 3 poster would be awesome to have.

Well you can have it if you enter our competition.

Originally Posted By Fnord (3 OCT 2012 2:17pm)

Borderlands is a multiplayer game, if you don't have someone to play it with, then it really is not a all that fun. 

 

Oh, and have you got Gods & Kings yet? It adds quite a lot of content to the game, and if you can find it on a sale or a cheap boxed copy (or have a friend in the US who can buy it for half the price compared to what it is here in Europe and then send you the key...), then I would highly recommend it. 

Yeah borderlands is all about the mutliplayer and playing with friends

Anyone playing Dishonored? The review I've read has been outstanding. It's coming out in the UK in a week or so. I don't know if it's out in the States or not but it definitely has made me curious.

Meanwhile I'm still very much enjoying KoA. I'm combining it with Darkness Within 2- also a rather good game although nowhere near as creepy as the first one.

I hadn't heard about it but it's supposed to be released here Oct. 9.

Found this neat interactive video.

Finished Game of Thrones RPG. As far as I am concerned, it is a must play for every fan of the books (I still have not watched the TV show).

I've pre-purchased Dishonored, and Steam is pre-loading it right now. Sadly, it does not unlock in Europe for 3 more days, but North Americans can enjoy it starting tomorrow.

Reviews so far have been raving, but it is more my gut feeling telling me that this one is worth the hype that convinced me to pre-purchase. Counting the days for release, not really playing anything until then.

. 

I've been following Bethesda's development of Dishonored too and agree that it looks like a fantastic game with true open-ended gameplay. 

Will wait for the reviews and player comments as always. But it is a very appealing, fresh approach to giving us real options for solving a variety of problems in a 3D game world. 

Cheers, Terry 

Terry, Dishonored is being published by Bethesda, but the devoloper is Arkane Studios, who also developed Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.

Arkane have grumbled about publisher interference having a negative effect on their company in the past (basically not having the freedom to make the games that they wanted to make), and have sang Bethesda's praises as to how much less restrictive/more encouraging they have been during Dishonored's development, allowing them to make a game they are proud of. Truth, or PR talk? I guess we'll know soon enough. 

I've also started Kingdoms of Amalur. Thus far, I have mixed feelings about it.

It looks nice, it sounds nice, it even feels nice (everything you do has a nice feel to it. The combat in particular is good in this regard, every blow has a nice sound effect that makes it feel like it actually hits something.

On the other hand, the camera bugs me. I want to zoom out further, but I can't. The character takes up too much space on the screen. Also, during combat the camera tends to turn towards the next enemy in line, if you are in the middle of an attack chain, which means that you might suddenly not see another enemy, that you know will attack you soon, but not exactly when. I've taken several cheap hits this way. Luckily this game has thus far been so easy that it does not really matter, even though I'm playing on hard.

Also, combat seem to be quite button mashy. I can pull off special attacks, but it does not really feel like I should, they all leave me more open to enemy attacks, as they take more time to do. The only one that I've found to be useful thus far is the one where you hold down the attack button for a short while and then release it, as it has a good amount of added reach. So I end up just mashing buttons, throwing the odd spell from time to time when the enemy is too far away, and it works, too well. 

Also, the inventory is too small. 

About dishonored:

Non linear, industrial setting sounds amazing 

just too expensive for only 9 missions

Fnord I agree with you re the camera angle. Have you been to the Coilsbain ruins yet? The setting is absolutely stunning but I kept trying to angle out to see more of it.

The only way is to look up but even then with the map screen on it's not *big* enough.

I am thoroughly enjoying the game though. I like the fast travel option- it's nice to be able to store up on locations to visit them post-quest.

Re the inventory issue there are ways of storing objects in a house you can acquire and fast travel too rather easily so it's not too annoying at the moment.

I've only just started the game, so I have not got a house yet (last thing I did yesterday was to join the house of Ballads, so I'm not even out of the forest/have not visited any other towns than the first one).

I'm looking forward to seeing the other areas of the game, because I really like the visual design of the forest.

Originally Posted By markornikov (10 OCT 2012 4:24am)

About dishonored:

Non linear, industrial setting sounds amazing 

just too expensive for only 9 missions

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/10/08/dishonored-length/

I've been enjoying both Dishonored and Xcom, great games to bounce between since they are so different.

Xcom is just as addictive as the old one, not wanting your soldiers to die at all and the hard part of building up a squad only to run into a high lv alien that one-hits someone you've spent 3+ hours investing time into it. Even has an "ironman" that forces one-save file so you have to play with consequences and can't simply reload and have multiple saves.

Dishonored I can best describe as a mix of Thief and Hitman, it's very very well done and is best played by trying to play it as you would hitman while doing silent assassin (not being detected, non-leathal takedowns, etc).
 If you just run n'gun it it's a LOT shorter this way but you're missing out on a TON of things in the game world, plus the more people you kill the "worse" the ending is, if you wnat the best/good ending you need to kill as few people as you have to.

The artstyle in Dishonored is great, it's like a bit of victorian style mixed with a little steampunk in places.

I'm getting futher into KoA, and the game is getting better. Now the enemies are attacking fast enough for the "frantic clicking" strategy to not work. Also, even though I'm still not out of the forest (it is huge!) the game does seem to have a nice amount of variety to its artstyle. 

Sadly the whole mechanism where you can slow down time and deal extra damage (by undoing creatures "faith") gives you a lot of extra EXP, so I've entirely stopped using it, due to how it makes me outlevel enemies far too much. 

Glad you're liking it! I've suspended my quest-solving at the moment and am focusing on exploring the world- it is truly spectacular in parts.

I am slightly disappointed in the casualness of the quests though. It seems that no matter how serious they are (ie saving a village from a plague) the reaction you get to solving them is rather understated.

The whole point of the game is that your character is fateless and as such is a loose canon and can influence everyone else's destiny in unpredictable ways. As such you'd expect your actions to have more obvious consequences.

I'm still really enjoying the game though. It doesn't have the vividness of The Witcher but it is a fun RPG- I've played about 25 hours so far and I seem to be nowhere near finishing.

I enjoyed KoA, sadly we will likely never see another one after the mess that happened with the studio. If you never read about it basically the company took a huuuuuge government loan from Rhode Island and missed payments and ran out of money. It ended up closing shop and left a lot of emplyees without jobs (and some left holding the bill for their unsold homes in the previous state the studio was in before moving to Rhode Island for the loan).

Curt Schilling lost a ton of his baseball money from it (he was the one who owned/started the company).

A lot of the developers went on to work for Epic Games now.

On a mor epositive note, I will say the DLC for the game is actually worth it, at least the pirate themed one. Adds quite a bit of content for the price.

OMG, Dishonored's release passed me by.  Busy with exams, so it will have to wait for November.

It sounds great, though, so i'm rather impatient to get my hands on it.

Been playing World of Warcraft lately. The new expansion has impressed me honestly. A lot of people were terrified that it would be too childish, but even before playing it and looking at how it was designed, and what it was based off of, it really shouldn't strike one as childish.

Don't get me wrong the Pet battle system is a direct clone of Pokemon but the environments are beautiful, enemies varied and quite difficult at times, and quests and dungeons new and exciting, not all of them are "go kill this and come back, go gather that and come back" I've played one mission where you are a sniper picking off targets and one boss in a dungeon you can ride on top of rolling barrels into him to cause heavy damage.

I can't wait to see raids and the new option of "Scenarios"

Originally Posted By Maum (15 OCT 2012 2:42am)

I am slightly disappointed in the casualness of the quests though. It seems that no matter how serious they are (ie saving a village from a plague) the reaction you get to solving them is rather understated.

The whole point of the game is that your character is fateless and as such is a loose canon and can influence everyone else's destiny in unpredictable ways. As such you'd expect your actions to have more obvious consequences.

I agree. And this is sadly a problem that almost all open world games have, while the quests you undertake often sound world-changing, or at least like something that will save the entire region, they only have a marginal impact on the world, and the people you save will, at best, say thanks to you once the quest is over (and far to often they won't even comment on what you did for them)

I guess it would be quite hard to actually create a living game world, where your actions have far reaching consequences, without the developers having to re-write a lot of content for each major quest you accomplish. It is either that, or keep the quests more low-key (which probably would be better for most quests, not every village needs to be on the brink of destruction)

I'm still enjoying the game though. I'm going through the house of Ballads' quest, and it is quite fun. Also, there is a nice variety to the enemies. I think I'll beat this game, unless it gets a lot worse or very repetitive later on.

Originally Posted By Stiler (15 OCT 2012 11:19pm)

I enjoyed KoA, sadly we will likely never see another one after the mess that happened with the studio. If you never read about it basically the company took a huuuuuge government loan from Rhode Island and missed payments and ran out of money. It ended up closing shop and left a lot of emplyees without jobs (and some left holding the bill for their unsold homes in the previous state the studio was in before moving to Rhode Island for the loan).

I take it that the MMO that they were working on were at least a contributing factor to the studio's demise. KoA seem to have sold quite well, but MMOs are just too expensive to make for most studios (at least if they want to make a successful MMO), and World of Warcraft is still dominating the market to the point where it is night impossible for a similar MMO to get anywhere.

Originally Posted By Support (16 OCT 2012 11:42am)

Been playing World of Warcraft lately. The new expansion has impressed me honestly. A lot of people were terrified that it would be too childish, but even before playing it and looking at how it was designed, and what it was based off of, it really shouldn't strike one as childish.

I heard a lot of complains about the Pandarians before the expansion was released. People claimed that they were out of place and would never fit into the game, though they were an already established species in the warcraft universe (one that started as an April's fool, but still, they became official with the expansion to Warcraft 3). They seem to have been accepted now that the expansion is out though.

And it almost makes me want to return to WoW, though I'm not sure if I have the time to play that game.

Originally Posted By Fnord (17 OCT 2012 8:51am)

I guess it would be quite hard to actually create a living game world, where your actions have far reaching consequences, without the developers having to re-write a lot of content for each major quest you accomplish. It is either that, or keep the quests more low-key (which probably would be better for most quests, not every village needs to be on the brink of destruction)

But it's certainly possible in open-world games, Blowing up Megaton does have quite an impact on the game as do the endgame choices heavily impact the broken steel DLC. And i'm certain we've only seen the tip of the iceberg in this type of game.

Oh no no no. If you have a life i BEG you don't come back lol. there is SO much new stuff that is actually time consuming yet still fairly fun and addicting that it will eat up whatever else you had planned on doing. When you find you're going to have a rest period or you're running out of games to try/finish or get bored THEN come back.

The only reason I have not been completely absorbed into wasting all my time on WoW is because my wife can convince me otherwise lol