Happy Christmas, squelchy. :-)

Ah! I see. It's just some (possibly overpriced) tech support.
I imagine Apple says it has never been done before.

Good evening everyone*big hugs and waves*

Day one of the weekend seminar survived and the presentation went very well :)

I see. Hm...think i'll pass then.
Sounds a bit like Games Workshop which is also apparently fine with the crap warhammer games released ...

Yeah, it's not feeling like D&D at all. It feels like...an overly aggressive, multiplayer-focused version of Neverwinter Nights if the people who did NWN didn't give a damn about even trying to keep the mechanics to an actual version of the game it's based on.

I played it a while longer, and it's another case where it might have at least been decent if they hadn't tried to turn the guts of it into a cross between World of Warcraft and some Diablo clone.

Very stupid move, really. A video game would have been a great place to showcase the new mechanics added to 5th edition. A good experience with the game would make the idea of investing in the pen and paper books more appealing while eliminating some of the learning curve involved by way of players already knowing at least the basics of the system.

But rather than doing that, they tried to make it more accessible to a younger crowd and managed to alienate the people who'd be most interested.

Games don't need to be endlessly complicated to be interesting, but I think one of the worst things you can do is go with the approach that players are kind of dumb and won't get it unless you chop everything down as much as possible.

Baldur's Gate, Icewind, they had manuals you could bludgeon cattle to death with. And it was fine. If you didn't know how something worked, you'd look it up and learn. Between the in-game explanations and the supplemental info, you end up with a good idea of how it all works.

Maybe someday someone will be able to make another game that's really good while being accurate to the pen and paper version. Not getting my hopes up, though.

How do you think people going in with no expectations would like the game?
If it was taken as something with no real rules it had to follow?
I can't play it on either machine so it doesn't really effect me but I'm curious.

Uh that sounds really bad. But already guessed something like that when i read that an account is necessary to play the game...

Broadening the audience and alienating the core audience with that move seems like a common trend these days....

I think the experience would be better in that case. It wouldn't be great, but there wouldn't be that component of "What the hell are you idiots doing?" to it.
Yeah, I didn't know about that. So the first thing I got to do was set up the account before I played. Didn't really get the experience off to a good start.

Phew. I played Abuse again to the end. I had forgotten how hard this game can be.

Perhaps Torment: Tides of Numenara will cover this aspect. We only need to wait for its release at some time next year.

Understandable...having that necessity even for the free weekend is frankly infuriating....

Looking forward to that one, but it's not going to be a D&D game. That one should be based around, at least in part, the Numenera pen and paper game.

Hello!
Just read that daughter of Terry Pratchett, Rhianna Pratchett is among other things, a writer for games :)
And she was a co-writer for Risen!

Cool. Mirror's Edge too. I heard lots of people complain about the story, but I enjoyed it.

...
Also, good evenoon everyone :-)

Evenoons, Agent :)
Yeah, Mirror's Edge looks interesting... not on gog though (yet) ... maybe I'll go give my vote for it :)

Me too :-)
It's been quite a while since EA released a game here. Over a year and a half. I hope they haven't totally forgotten about us :-\

Hello, people of the quiet thread called Fred!

How are you all on this wintery Friday evening?

And just a random quote: "There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart." ~ Jane Austen.