Posts by Jetsetlemming

At the end of COP you can choose not to evacuate and the other army dudes just leave the Zone without you. Not that there's much reason to do this, you only get the ending stuff (Fallout style breakdowns of quest results and important character situations) if you leave, and afaik nothing new unlocks in the Zone if you do this.

Quote from kleinluka

glad you like the trailer =D~ more to come soooooonnnn

Yo Klein, hope you do something about weapons soon I want to know what DX1 weapons were available in 2025 (Better be the GEP gun!)

You could tell that trailer was made by the Final Fantasy CGI dudes pretty easily,

But still, cool aug design. This line in particular in the article, "we are returning to an inventory system reminiscent of the first game", makes me pretty happy. We don't get nearly enough games that let you carry around a customizable arsenal. In DX1 I tended to roll with a laser sword, a GEP gun, a sawed off shotgun, a wrist mounted crossbow, and a sniper rifle, and that was only like a third of the weapons in the game.

Also, as an aside, man IGN is unprofessional as always. That question about why DX3's a prequel should've been edited, or replaced. Surely somebody not a douchebag asked something along those lines. Although, in response to the response, there's all that time between DX1 and 2 where a game could fit. I've always wanted to see Deus Ex's world immediately after DX1 ended, assuming DX2's setup of all three endings in their own way occuring. That'd be some pretty heavy shit.

Quote from D3ads

Ahahahahahahyahahahahahahahahahahahah those fucking quotes coupled with that fucking score ahahahahahahahah I'm dying here jesus christ

Seriously how do you go from "One of the best FPS and the survivor horrors ever made, and also one of the best movies except it's a videogame", to "B"

Quote from Pericolos0

cry me a river

Ice burns like those must be a pretty nice benefit of the job, that and gloating about being able to play Diablo 3 already

So do you place those billions of dots manually, or does the "IT'S LIKE GOOGLE GOOGLE MAKES BILLIONS WE'LL MAKE BILLIONS INVEST IN US" engine just sort of generate them on its own.

It was barely offtopic anyway, a discussion of the tools Portal 2's being made in. At least, it wasn't off topic compared to this discussion of post deletion.

I could care less about graphics most of the time (I played Stalker cop in static rendering lol), but I hope they get around to upgrading their physics system. I replayed Portal for the radio achievement and carrying those things around sucked ass, they kept managing to get stuck under my invisible feet or pulled from my hands, or stuck on portals, or otherwise just a big pain in the ass to manipulate.

Scans of the ~12 page Game Informer article on Portal 2 are online. Here's the gist:

Lengthy SP campaign, plus separate coop campaign where the players are robots

Coop campaign will be harder, as you have someone else to think up solutions with

Game's set "hundreds of years" post Portal

SP protagonist is Chell again

3x the staff working on the game (though no Kim Swift, she left Valve last year)

Big upgrade to the graphics/level detail, with foliage in some parts of the lab that have been overgrown, and more dynamic lights etc.

From the ending of Portal, when all those AI balls lit up, with a cake in front of them? Those will be "characters" in Portal 2, there will now be NPCs besides just turrets hanging around.

Game starts with one such AI ball waking Chell up from stasis to help him move to another part of the complex (They can only get around normally on rails on the ceiling, what with just being a sphere with a handle)

Textures changed from just "Usable" or "Not usable" for portals, different designs have different effects on portals and you as you pass through them

Physics effects like suction are also transferred through portals, the article gives an example of putting one portal at the end of a vacuum tube and the other over a turret to remove it

Players will by able to dynamically paint surfaces/objects with colored paint which alters behaviors, article mentions orange paint (speeds you up when you run on it) and blue paint (bouncy)

Quote from Skjalg

so why does the press release have underlined text everywhere?edit; it spells out "drattmannh0nee" wtf?

Drattmann/h0nee turns out to be a new login/pass for the BBS in the Portal Arg, which reveals images encoded in a proprietary BASIC format, with info on the backup/backup login for how to compile a DOS BASIC program to actually render the images. They turn out to be this:

http://portalwiki.net/index.php/APF_Images

Which pretty much means a) Yeah, it's coop, and b) This is the end of the arg, or, c) It's something else entirely.

Drattmann, identified as Doug Rattmann (creator of the APF format used for those images) is an Aperture employee, and possibly the guy who left those hidden area messages you find in Portal, those are referred to as "Rat holes" in the commentary and the original concept of the game had an NPC named "The Rat Man" who was lost in the enrichment center and kinda batty and was responsible for those hidden areas. Valve cut him after thinking it'd be just as effective and less bothersome to just let the player read the walls without having a dude there acting crazy in front of them.

Those bullet points don't mention one interesting claim that I saw, which was that in the contract Activision had with West/Zapella the IW guys were given exclusive control over the Call of Duty series past the Vietnam era, with Activision not allowed to make a game past then without written concept from IW's heads. This was an agreement in exchange to get IW to make Modern Warfare 2 in the first place. IW had started planning to move on to their new IP/new setting past Modern Warfare post MW2, as per what their contract with Activision allowed them to do.

Quote

":2b8547r7]Yes, Peris works at Blizzard and he sounds happy.

From what I've heard Vivendi/Blizzard is the bigger half of the Activision Blizzard merger. I don't think anyone has to worry about Blizzard anytime soon.

I don't care about length so much as if it's interesting content. I've never beaten the two NWN1 expansions, Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark, and I hear those are pretty substantially sized. I just got them so I could play the custom modules that required them. Then, with NWN2, you have Mask of the Betrayer and everyone recommends that even over the normal game.

Quote from Furyo

i think another point to be made is about the nature of the payment. By nature the smaller DLCs are (to me at least) a matter of impulsive purchases, so permitting easy payment methods should interest your own customers Jeremy. I'm thinking a publisher based system that spans all their game, where you sign up a bit like you would with Xbox Live or PSN, and you would withdraw straight from money you deposited there either via credits or real money. I think with these transactions, a good part of the lost sales come when you need to enter your credit card details and add additional points or money to your account. It gives customers a minute to think about it again, or they have to get up and find their card etc etc.

I think this is something that really helps along the deals and small games on Steam, when a game's like $5 or under (the price last christmas I bought Alien Shooter Reloaded, Bioshock, and over a dozen other really good games), it suddenly becomes not a judgement of money vs value, but effort vs value, and with Steam the effort to get a game is like 30 seconds of clicking "next" in the purchase process if you've already gone through it before and entered your info. This also feels fairer, not to mention being faster, than having to buy fake money in big chunks and then spending those on the actual products I want. I'm fishy about the entire idea of those, because I'm not paying the developer (or at least, I don't feel like I'm paying the developer), I'm paying MS or Nintendo and trusting them to pass it along. I know that with any sort of payment system I'm doing that, but when I'm putting my money down straight on the game I want, that feels more direct and honest. I don't get that feel good feeling of "I'm helping a developer I like make more stuff I like" when I'm buying fake money and then giving them that fake money.

Quote from SpicyTanuki

DLC has changed my policy about buying games. Since games with DLC eventually come out a couple years later packaged with all the previous content for a reduced cost I just wait until that point comes. Because of that I haven't purchased Dragons Age or Fallout3 yet. I'm patient, I would rather wait for the "whole package" 2 years later than buy it now and incrementally keep up with the addons.

I'm happy though because at the end I get a larger game for less money

The whole package for Fallout 3 is already out, though, I'm pretty sure Beth has publicly said Mothership Zeta was the final FO3 DLC, and they're all up to that one included with the GOTY edition.

Quote from Izuno

Jetsetlemming - does that include for shooter games? ie...ever buy a mappack for a Call of Duty game or other shooter? Those seem to be relatively popular DLCs...almost to the point of being mini expansions though I would definitely not classify them as true expansions.

I play these on PC, and I can't think of any PC games with commercial map packs, at least none that I own. I really like the content Valve releases though, like the TF2 character pack updates. I actually just started a reinstall of TF2 today, and while the install prompt claimed 2.7 GB, Steam started downloading 4.9 GB of content. I was dumbfounded to see that number.

I've never bought a single piece of DLC, though back in the day I would regularly get expansion packs for full games. I'm anticipating Dragon Age: Awakenings cause it sounds like a real good sized expansion instead of the super small stuff that typically passes for DLC (even though I'm only like three hours into the main game so far, I really liked what I played but then got distracted, it's been hard to sit down and put a significant amount of time into games lately. Even a replay of Portal cause the new radios + ending I haven't managed to finish yet...)

Those teaser images are pretty great.

Quote from Furyo

I can honestly say there is absolutely no way this has anything to do with Zampella and West's departure.

I dunno, there's been a lot of stuff in the past about how protective IW are about the Call of Duty brand, and "Action adventure COD" seems like the sort of thing that would bother them. I remember there being some shit back before WaW came out when IW came out and publicly complained about Treyarch and Activision trying to attach the game to COD4 as much as possible.

http://investor.activision.com/released ... eID=448656

Whole lotta words and boasting but the part that sticks out to me is

Quote

The company is also for the first time announcing that a new game in the Call of Duty series is expected to be released in 2011 and that Sledgehammer Games, a newly formed, wholly owned studio, is in development on a Call of Duty game that will extend the franchise into the action-adventure genre. Sledgehammer is helmed by industry veterans Glen A. Schofield and Michael Condrey. Prior to joining Activision Publishing, Schofield was the Executive Producer of the award-winning game, Dead Space and Michael Condrey was the Sr. Development Director on the game. The Dead Space franchise has won more than 80 industry awards worldwide including the prestigious A.I.A.S. Action Game of the Year and two B.A.F.T.A.S.The Call of Duty business unit will be led by Philip Earl, who currently runs Activision Publishing's Asia Pacific region and previously served in senior executive positions with Procter & Gamble and Nestle. Activision Publishing veterans Steve Pearce, chief technology officer and Steve Ackrich, head of production, will lead Infinity Ward on an interim basis. Jason West and Vince Zampella are no longer with Infinity Ward.

Apparently the rumors are now that

a)Activision weren't paying IW their due royalties for MW2's sales

b) IW's contract with Activision ends in October, and

c) Activision wanted MW3 before then.