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Comments
That and I think Alex is rubbing off of me.I've always prefered the wanderer class, I like the starting outfit.
You should play the Knight starting class (as opposed to a knightly sort of dude in general) if you want to use miracles as well. The starting faith and attunement stats mean that if you're not going to use miracle support, you're wasting points. If you want pure combat, Warrior, Bandit and Hunter are the best choices -- the first for balance between strength and dexterity, the second for strength, the third for dexterity.
The Knight is best used for mixed combat/faith builds, so bear in mind that you'll want (eventually) an endurance of 40 and attunement 12-16 (for two to four magic slots). How you balance strength, dexterity and faith is up to you, but the best faith scores are thus:
For strength, you'll want at least 16 for the basic greatsword-class weapons, those being the bastard sword and claymore. These can be upgraded down the normal path (if you choose to focus on strength and dexterity over faith, or if you choose to buff) or down the divine path (if you choose not to buff and focus on faith). Dexterity depends on whether you're going flat-out faith or making a more balanced build. If you want a knightly character with high faith, then you might want to ignore dexterity for the most part (perhaps take it up to 12 or 14, but no further) and focus on strength.
If you tell me more about what kind of knight you want, I can help narrow things down a lot.
So, I have actually finished my article for Friday and started the one for next week. Yay for being ahead.
Posted the Mass Effect Retrospective.
"Then in Mass Effect 2, Cerberus is suddenly an organization to rival any interplanetary government,"
I think you mean "Mass Effect 3" there.
You referred to ME2, and then compared it to ME2 again.
So naturally I assumed there was something wrong.
Quantum Conundrum review rant is up.
I really think you could have benefited from explaining more about the transition from puzzle game to not-puzzle game.
I would have, but in-game it's kind of abrupt. One room's a puzzle, the next is one of the obstacle courses I described.
Though I think I will make that clearer when I edit the article. Next week's article will be the last before I take a break to go back and fix up all the ones I have posted and make a buffer and stuff.
I haven't played the game, so I can't really comment.
It just seems like you didn't go into much detail. "You can phase between dimensions and throw boxes, although the physics are a little wonky, but then it's not a little wonky and you have to progress through each room just so."
I think this drags the game down through taking away the player's agency and capacity to solve puzzles in a way that they find out as opposed to a way the game wants, but I'm not sure, because there's not enough info in the article there.
That's pretty much it. For much of the game, instead of entering the room and seeing a puzzle, you enter a room and see a series of obstacles with known solutions that you just have to implement with flawless timing.
Yeah, I know that, but that's because I kinda cheated and looked online and thought about your previous articles.
Thing is, you barely talked about the actual puzzles. You say "It's a puzzle game", but that's it, and then you go on about how the game is terrible because it stops being a puzzle game, without telling us how it was at the start.
It's the type of article that focused on a good game that turned bad because of one design decision, but the article focused entirely on that one design decision, without noting the good parts of the game and how they propped the game up, and how the game decision turned those all worthless.
This is most evident in the aesthetics section, where you practically just said "yeah yeah, they're decent I guess, now I'm sick of this article, can I go do something else?".
I really think you could have done a lot better if you had explained how the game was good before the game changed, and then talked about how the design decision changed those elements and how that made the game worse than before.
Fair enough.
It's that saying- "You can learn more from a bad book than from a good book."
In showing how a game was bad, you can learn a lot about how to avoid that mistake. In showing how a lot of good elements were rendered bad by a single design decision, you can show people how to avoid making mistakes like that in future, or figuring out what the bad designs in other games were.
Yeah.
I think I'll expand the article quite a bit when I get to it during the revision period.
That's what I was going to suggest
You did. Just not explicitly.
So, for my next article, I'm having to make my own images.
I am having far, far too much fun doing that.
Steam Greenlight article is up.
It's my least serious article thus far, but I had a lot of fun making it and think it's legitimately interesting, so whatever.
Anyway, I'm now going to be going back over my existing articles and making them better, so no entirely new updates for awhile.
That was a fun read.
Thanks
Making my own images for an article (especially when they're supposed to look bad) is really fun. I have another article like that I've been working on, but it won't be ready to post for some time.
And...the actual relaunch begins with an explanation of my new review score system and a slightly-tweaked review of Human Revolution.
Didn't feel the need to change much for the HR review, but some of the later reviews (especially the Pokèmon one) will be pretty hugely different.
Also, I had trouble with that boss, too. But there's some very simple things you can do to ease it, the most obvious being the use of the Quen sign. When he's shielded, use your own Quen sign and avoid him until he's open -- without his magical shield, he's just like any other adversary, but with high HP. Dodging is better than blocking and so on and so forth. The issue isn't combat balance as much as it's CD Projekt Red's weaknesses in teaching players how to use their systems.
Besides, The Witcher 2 outstrips the first in every other facet, and probably deserves a 10 according to the guideline of contributing to the medium as a whole. But like SpecOps, you have to make it much or all of the way through to get that.
I'm gonna wait for him to actually write an article on it explaining the flaws before saying anything.
Well, the other thing is that as good as The Witcher is, The Witcher 2 is a clear progression upwards in every sense. It has a better plot, better characterisation, greater player convenience, equivalent quest design and so on and so forth. There are some things about the first game that are better, such as the character progression system -- but for my money, The Witcher 2 explodes out of those standards and is as close to "perfect" as the traditional WRPG has ever been.
Well, I dunno. See-
That seems like a really significant flaw to me.
Shit like that really makes claims that it's as close to "perfect" as WRPG's have gotten seem kind of silly- or, rather, puts it into perspective, because that's really kind of sad.
Teaching the player how to play the game is really kind of an integral part of making a game- otherwise, you end up with an obtuse system that the player has to teach themselves, which is really not very desirable. Games which don't teach the players how to play them are pretty massively flawed.
Two ends of a spectrum, I guess- games which force the player into an explicit tutorial are also kind of bad.