katssun

@BFBeast666

The solution probably *is* Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale style. It's the best combination of both, incredibly without the disadvantages of either style. You took control of up to 6 party members simultaneously, more than the typical four of menu-based RPGs.

The overwhelming majority of users never took advantage of it, but Baldur's Gate had turn-based combat. You just never saw the numbers behind it all when it played through the queue of actions in real-time. The game could be set to auto-pause after a variety of actions (all your players, any player or opponent, etc). You could set it to see every dice throw too if you really wanted all that clutter in the dialogue bar.

The hybrid style allows you to breeze through the small, tedious battles, or pause for strategy. But the auto-pause and roll displays settings gave everyone exactly the kind game they wanted.

In the largest/toughest battles, I know I paused every time I had to coordinate actions, or perform a quick heal or tactical retreat.

My heart broke when Amazon canceled my pre-order.

Hopefully they're just giving it a slight two-quarter delay or something like that. Or deciding to finish Grand Knights History first.

@Wackydavo

Regarding point (2) and people not involved in the kickstarter campaign: The first reward tier is $15. That's about the price of a game on XBLA. Like Stacking was. They're not losing much, if anything on this, and a lot of the backers are paying quite a deal more.

Still no images of Talim? I know they're going with a lot of characters that miraculously don't age (Maxi), or replacing the ones that would to too old, but Talim should be still able to fight.

If they just throw her into the game as she always is, but make her a "bonus character" instead of aging her properly, I'm going to be disappointed. It'll feel like they weren't serious about the 17 year difference.

Tiny Wings!

I love that game. I will borrow friends/relatives iPhones just to play it. Even if only for a few minutes...

This doesn't explain why we're not getting Jade Empire 2.

The vita looks like it has a really strong launch (or near launch?) line-up. There were a number of the titles that I wasn't sure on, but now look really worth picking up (Super Stardust Delta especially) just on the variety of controls alone.

The technology in the Vita isn't that innovative, but the ways they're incorporating it is something I haven't seen before, like the crush mode by using both touchpads. Pretty clever.

@Faceless Troll

"Skyrim isn't anything like Oblivion or the two Fallouts," in terms of modding, which is what Colin was discussing.

You don't have to play with .ini files just to get mods to work, or create an "ArchiveInvalidation.txt" file, there hasn't been a real need for a mod manager yet, etc.

Of course in game mechanics borrow from the Fallout games. But since you brought it up, the kill animations actually look a lot better. Fallout didn't have throat slicing or sword impaling. Just the same old bashing you'd get outside of VATS.

@Colin

While it's nice that some of the really talented modders out there will get some real recognition for their efforts, Skyrim isn't anything like Oblivion or the two Fallouts. The Nexus community (among others) has made it really easy to locate, install, and even help you create mods.

Furthermore, Bethesda has been helping on their end as well. Skyrim is by far the easiest of their games to mod. It's pretty much drag and drop into the Data folder. Archive Invalidated appears to be on by default now, so any mod installed simply overrides the vanilla .bsa files, no additional effort required.

The downside is that the Steam Workshop has an approval process. If TF2 is an example of this, something close to 1 in a 100 submitted mods actually make it into the listing.

@xiLeShadow

Zenimax is an entity created *by* Bethesda Softworks, founded by the Bethesda founders. It's literally a shell company to allow them to buy other companies.