Aisynia

Lots of Love to you and all the devs Kevin. I hope you all land safely and softly and prosper into the future.

I love you Andy, I hope you can move on to bigger and better things. That goes for you and all of the devs there. You are the best development studio I've ever seen, and this? This is a shame beyond all shames.

BABs and Castle have not worked there in some time.

I used to hate this, but then I played Star Trek Online. Love that game but..

Tactical Officers were originally promoted as being able to off-tank. They can't and never could do it effectively. They just have lots of DPS.

Engineers were originally purported to be the hardiest and most survivable of the three, especially due to a fast recharging ability to recharge their shields almost instantly. That got nerfed.

Science Officers were originally supposed to be healers and debuffers, and they do in fact have those tools.

What do we currently have, in actuality?

Science Officers. They are the best tanks and the best healers, because of their ability to heal themselves so effectively. After all, if I can heal you this well, why not cut out the middleman, grab aggro, and just heal myself?

Sadly, top tier content seems to be designed around that. Needless to say, I rolled a sci.

Okay so it's a while away.

Wow, I want to do that.

I have the opposite issue. I can't hear them at all, except that one AOE. I don't have the set, but I played extensively in a duo with one, and I almost never heard the staff sounds. Most of them are very quiet.

Yeah she did her normal thing where she ignored the important part of your post. You're right, it did look like more of a city. These days, especially zones like Steel Canyon, they look like a bunch of buildings dropped out of a bag and left where they fell.. not so much a city. Praetoria was a massive improvement in city design and TBH, all of Paragon and the Rogue Isles need a similar makeover.. though that isn't realistic any time soon.

I've always wanted a butt slider.

I don't think it's all that accurate that we don't see failure until adulthood, that is a serious over-generalization.

I think most people simply use games and other media as an escape from our hectic lives where failure is and always has been a harsh reality. I won't get into the politics behind all that, but will simply say that if I'm escaping and playing a game, I want to just succeed, because failure isn't fun, and failure is for the real world. That said, I do want the knowledge that I could fail if I didn't play smart.

Yeah that's Funcom for you. I played AO a long long time ago. They wouldn't know polish if it hit them in the face. Their games are usually fun, but filled with bugs.

No.

I like and respect Arcana, but posting a big "look at me I made lots of posts" thread is always.. well I can't say that politely, so I won't, because again, I like and respect her. Conversely, I won't pander either.

I have around 35k posts on another forum network. all it proved was that I wasted my time.

No offense, I like you, and you've helped me out with a couple things in the past, but I really thought you were above measuring parts you don't even technically have.

Insert my stock response to anyone who does this: So?

I have a character whose super strength is the result of high tech gauntlets that fuse themselves to her arms. She's super reflexes. If she actually gets shot or punched by someone like Recluse, she'll just die.

It's usually the tools the developers have, not the engine specifically, or whether its Direct X, Open GL etc.

I've never had an actual game design job, but I have years of experience with modding several different games using development kits, and I've dove pretty deeply into them.

With some development tools, world building is easy once you learn the ins and outs of it, and in others, it's a nightmare even if you know what you're doing.

For instance, the various development kits used by Bethesda since Morrowind. It's been essentially the same system that has evolved and been streamlined over time. Some systems have changed significantly (for instance, scripting changed pretty dramatically between the GECK and the Skyrim CK, particularly with the addition of keywords and radiant quest scripting). Another example would be the switch from pathgridding to navmeshing for NPC pathing (I hate navmeshing even though I recognize it's a superior system).

I digress somewhat..

In the Bethesda kits, world building is really easy once you know where all the art assets are. Of course, those art assets had to be made by an artist, but speaking only of the building of the world itself, it isn't much more complicated than click and drag, with a few extra hotkeys here and there to control axis, scaling, rotation, etc. It's very intuitive. Apart from the world building, the CK has almost everything totally centralized. Only the model and texture files themselves exist outside the CK, though their whereabouts and properties need to be imported into it (which is a very simple process).

On the other hand, I have to wonder how BioWare ever finishes a game. Their kit is a decentralized, unintuitive disaster area, and even with tutorials, will hit anyone inexperienced with game development in general (professional or otherwise) like a massive brick wall.

I've used a lot of "SDKs", but these two are particularly noteworthy at two ends of the spectrum of usability and recognition.

I think the one thing I have learned above everything is to never make the assumption that any particular development team will automatically have a set of tools (world building or otherwise) that will make any particular thing easy. Development tools mature and grow over time, and you can bet good money that whatever internal tools they are using at Paragon have been improved dramatically since the game was first launched, but no kit is perfect, and it's not always the kit itself.

People use the term "engine" far too often when referring to any number of things. In this case, it may simply be how the world is put together. I don't pretend to know how their tools work, or how their world is built, but if I had to hazard a guess, it's probably less about moving something, and more about the consequences of that movement (how it affects collision, enemy and pet pathing, etc.).

Didn't say it wasn't. It's definitely a cop-out. I still liked it, would have preferred something different though.

It's a typo...

You are missing the point by a mile. All of the co-op arcs have strongly heroic overtones. We would like just once, that heroes be required to do something villainous for the greater good, while we actually get to be truly evil.

Those initial villain lines to Heather are deceptive, smart*** comments. Heather also expresses reservation throughout the arc that she's working with a villain, and that she's confused as to why you would ever help. At the same time, orange text pops up frequently just to give an "inner exposition" about how you may ultimately be able to use this to make yourself more powerful and screw everyone else. It's pretty cool.

Yeah.. it's a very unfortunate attitude. There would probably be more villains if there was enough of a reason to play them. St. Martial needs a major story revamp, I think it's by far the biggest misstep. Almost all of its arcs are completely terrible.