Vcize

As someone who hasn't played DA2 yet I don't know what to think. The people who say the game sucked are all voted up and the people who say it gets too much flak and was still pretty good are all voted up as well.

MAKE UP YOUR MIND PEOPLE.

This isn't the first time this has happened. It's just another example we can throw in the faces of the dolts saying "hurr durr just buy your games new" when people complain about online passes.

I buy all my games new and I LOATHE online passes.

@CaramelZappa

Sorry, I didn't clarify. The thing that people are clamoring for is dead room chat in private rooms. The idea is that in private rooms you're playing with friends so people aren't abusing the party system.

There is a poll up on the Gears 3 forums where the Epic devs say if it gets enough support they'd add it back in to private rooms. The poll has 97% of people saying add it back, and Epic basically said "ah nevermind, didn't make the cut".

We're able to fill up a room of buddies for Gears quite frequently and it absolutely KILLS it that there is no dead room chat. We probably play 1/10th as much as we would (and used to in G1) because of it.

STILL NO DEAD ROOM CHAT.

Argh.

@KushiiOG

Not a remake according to this: http://www.gamesta.com/call-of-duty-coming-to-ps-vita/

@baby sea tuna

I think XBL is meant to be independent of the particular console we're on. I'd be shocked if we're not all automatically using the same gamertag, with the same account details, gamerscore, and subscription time on the next xbox.

@Co

We need like a sticky for this answer or something, since it seems to come up often.

The simple answer is that using voice commands through the kinect and using voice commands through the headset are in no way comparable.

With the Kinect, all the processing is done and the game just gets back the raw command. The Kinect figures out that the person said "Liara: Singularity" and from a programming standpoint it's basically the same thing as a button press. You just setup a listener for that input and when you get it, it triggers an action (Liara throws a singularity).

A headset just returns raw audio. From a programming standpoint you don't get "Liara: Singularity". You get a .wav file that programmatically looks like a bunch of funny shapes. From there you have to write the software to actually decode that file into an input. You have to filter out the background noise, account for accents, and of course there's the entire task of actually parsing the text which is a big enough deal that entire companies do it as their entire business.

Simply put, integrating a single voice command from the headset probably costs 1 developer about 5 minutes and 5 lines of code. Integrating a single voice command from the headset would probably take around 10 developers several hundred thousands of lines of code, if not millions, and months to years worth of work.

When it comes to integrating voice commands the excessive cost of doing it from the headset just isn't worth it unless you're building your whole game around it (IE: Endwar). You don't throw out several million bucks and months to years worth of time to throw in another feature. On the flipside, with the Kinect, the cost is minimal.

There's also the fact that the Kinect offloads some of the voice recognition work to its own processor whereas with the headset you would have to limit the rest of the game to account for the increased load on the 360's processor.

I was pleasantly surprised by how immersive and convenient the kinect controls were in this game. I thought it was just going to be a tacked on thing but when I go back to play another run-through of ME2 the Kinect controls are probably the thing I'll miss most.

"Fabled game developer Peter Molyneux"

Nice.

And shame on the rest of you for it taking 21 comments for this to come up.

@Jokkl

Mass Effect isn't really about the shooting, but even with that said ME2 was one of the most fun "shooters" I've ever played, especially with the Vanguard. Even if you took out all the story, characters, etc I still would have had more fun with it than most shooters.

Being overrun by like 8 baddies and mixing up different weapons, ammo types, and abilities (CHARGE) to work through it all is way more fun than I have with 99% of the shooter grinds out there.