LawGamer

@ichthy said:

Yep. You gotta play with them a whole bunch to tire them out and then feed them so they sleep through the night. You'll probably go through a few play cycles before kitty is well an truly tired out too. The good news is you've got an 8-year old cat, so she won't be quite as energetic as a younger one.

Personally, I wouldn't recommend letting her in your bedroom at night. Cats can be very affectionate and sweet, but this usually just ends up with them sleeping on your head, or in some position where you otherwise can't move. Plus, you get cat hair on everything, which depending on if you have allergies can be a bad thing for sleeping.

If you are absolutely dead set on having her in your room, you need to make somewhere for her to sleep that they view as being more comfortable than your bed. If you put a heating pad on low underneath a blanket and put that on a comfy chair, that might work. But as I said, the better option is to give them somewhere else in the house to sleep.

I think most people have covered the points I would touch on. To which I would only add this: If I were a developer, I would think long and hard about putting out any kind of trailer at all until I was damn close to release.

Case in point, Wolfenstein2 looks awesome. It also comes out in October, so I'm reasonably certain the game will look pretty close to what was shown since they don't have time to change anything substantial. Anthem looks awesome too, but it's more than a year out and it's probably even money the thing will get delayed. It's an almost sure bet that the game won't look quite as good when it does come out, either.

If I were making a game and chose to do anything farther out from release, I'd probably prefer a series of "behind the scenes" videos so that people can see the development process a little bit and if you're changing anything you get to contextualize it instead of the process being (a) awesome looking trailer --> (b) less awesome looking game.

Sign me up. TNO was unexpectedly awesome and this looks like, at a minimum, more of the same. Riding a giant mechanical attack dog with a flamethrower for a mouth? Yes, please.

Pro: It looks nice.

Con: So does Horizon: Zero Dawn, and I already own that.

Pro: It does want to scratch that loot-shooter itch.

Con: So does Destiny, and I already own that.

Pro: It has mech suits.

Con: So does Titanfall 2, and I already own that.

So basically, I already own this game. And while it's nice that BioWare is at least trying to branch out, I'd prefer them to branch out by trying something no one else has done rather than something derivative. They made their name by being trendsetters and now they're just putting other games into a blender and hoping for the best.

@werupenstein said:

The short answer is - no.

The long answer is - despite wanting to make a game inspired by ME1, they completely failed to understand what made the core of that game great. Based on that Kotaku article, BioWare seem to think that Mass Effect 1 was about "exploration," which while technically true, is an entirely facile way of thinking about it. To the extent people wanted to explore the original Mass Effect it was only because of the great characters and the care with which they constructed the universe.

Those things are entirely absent from Andromeda. The characters are all a bunch of obnoxious idiots you want to throw out the airlock and there are so many continuity errors I'm not sure you could list them all. Sure, you "explore" planets, but they're just a bunch of single note boxes. You've got the Ice Planet, and the Jungle Planet, and the Fire Plant. Two Desert Planets. But there's nothing interesting going on with any of them. Just a bunch of gormless NPCs and stupid fetch quests. It's just a stunning miss. A better character creator or a few fixes to broken quests aren't going to help a game be worthwhile when the core of that game is so badly put together.

I tried the Secret World not too long ago. I came away thinking that it could have been a really special MMO if say, Blizzard had made it as opposed to FunCom.

I loved the concept. An MMO set in modern day is something that doesn't come along very often. The story was neat and generally very well written and I'm a sucker for Cthulu stuff so I was sold after the first New England area. And I also loved a lot of the ARG sort of stuff they did with having to visit outside websites to complete quests or figure out puzzles. When that worked, it was super neat and something that was different any other game I can think of. A lot of the quests had really bonkers solutions as well. There was one early one where you could only complete it if you were dead at the time.

But everything surrounding that story and concept was kind of terrible. The environments and character models were very blah, and didn't animate particularly well. The ability wheel, while meant to give you a ton of options, just ended up being a confusing mess, and none of the abilities had any impact. Your character would flail around in an animation and the enemies wouldn't react at all.

Unfortunately, I don't really see how they've solved some of those core problems with the update. It still looks dated, even given the relaxed standards of the MMO genre and in the video the combat still looks like a mess despite the targeting reticle. It doesn't seem like they've made things any less confusing (just listen to that Shotgun explanation. Holy shit, could it be any more incomprehensible?) and all the meters going up and down make me question their assertion that they've gotten rid of builders. It just doesn't seem like much of an overhaul to me. If anything it looks worse, since their explanations of how things work seem overly complicated and in some cases completely random (hey, you ever want a class where abilities don't work consistently and shit happens at random? Great news! We have Chaos Magic! It does . . . things.)

I'd like to see them make this a single-player/cooperative action game like Diablo as opposed to trying to force it into an MMO mold.

More important to me in my mind than it is as an actual real-world thing I would use.

I still own most of my old consoles, so if I want to fire up some old stuff I can do it. It's a pain in the ass, but I can do it. But the question is how often do I actually do that? Not very often if I'm honest. And when I do, it makes you pretty quickly realize how far games have come in the intervening years. Of all of the games that were great at the time, maybe like 10% still hold up in the sense that you can bear to play them today.

So I kinda agree with Jim Ryan. He stated his opinion in the most ham-fisted way possible, but I think he's right. If we're really honest with ourselves, we would probably not actually use whatever backwards compatibility would be offered all that much.

I would classify it as executive meddling if BioWare told EA Frostbite really didn't work for the game they were trying to make and were told to use it anyway. Whatever they might have saved in not having to license an engine they seem to have lost in the extra man-hours banging their head against technical issues.

I'm also curious about how much cross-team communication there was between the ME team and the DA team? BioWare wants to play up their creative interchange between their various studios, but it seems like DA:I faced a lot of the same issues trying to make an RPG in Frostbite. That game came out at least alright, so they might have been a good resource to talk to, but the article kind of implies that the teams never really talked.

Not a great surprise, really. I think the underlying problem is that it sort of seems like BioWare is chasing other developers' popular games and ideas (open world! procedural generation!) rather than being confident in what they're actually good at. That, and EA forcing them to use an engine that basically sucks at what they're trying to use it for (and as someone who thought the environments were really 'blah' I'm not even sure it's very good at that).