>> ^MilkmanDan:

Yep, I have Fable 1. I'd agree that Fable 1 isn't really a sandbox game, but there are so few games that are that I tend to take games that aren't really in that mold and play them as if they were. As long as I don't have to screw around with too much story to get to where I can just run along and do my own thing, I can live with it.
Even the GTA series, probably the most popular example of a fairly "pure" sandbox design, often require you to do some random story crap before you actually open up the map... There's always roadblocks at the start of the game unless you mod them out!


Morrowind, Fallout, Gothic, Risen, Oblivion, Just Cause 2, are all more sanboxy than Fable. Maybe even The Witcher, though that is strongly story driven but in a very good way, much more gray and mature than Fable.

>> ^cybrbeast:

X-COM? They raped it? NNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooo!!!!


Did they ever. Don't try to look up screenshots or watch video of it with sharp objects in your hands.

>> ^Xaielao:
Rage (shown on PC), Portal 2, Crysis 2 (show on PC but they lied and said it was xbox until a crash proved otherwise), Civ V, Deus Ex, The Old Republic, Witcher 2, Brink, Shogun II, Fable III among others. Mind few of these are PC exclusives but they were shown/demod on a PC or have clear PC leanings (or in the case of Fable, were announced for PC when the last one completely avoided it hehe).


Yeah, I suppose it's hard to define what a PC game is anymore. Did think Deus Ex looked very promising, and Brink has always looked good, so I hope they manage to release it eventually. Games of show were Portal 2 and Deus Ex in my opinion. It's a shame they didn't do a public showing of the Deus Ex demo.

>> ^Xax:

>> ^Xaielao:
PC gaming was pretty solid however, and that is nice to see for a change.

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH?!?? How in the hell was PC gaming anything but sorely lacking at this E3?


Rage (shown on PC), Portal 2, Crysis 2 (show on PC but they lied and said it was xbox until a crash proved otherwise), Civ V, Deus Ex, The Old Republic, Witcher 2, Brink, Shogun II, Fable III among others. Mind few of these are PC exclusives but they were shown/demod on a PC or have clear PC leanings (or in the case of Fable, were announced for PC when the last one completely avoided it hehe).

FF comes from *Asia

Also, I have to agree with the sentiment that "if you have to wait 20 hours for it to get going, you're doing it wrong."

I almost didn't get into the Witcher because, as Yahtzee correctly pointed out in his "first impressions" review (he should've called this the same!), it kind of straggled out of the gate. Fortunately I got more into it, but the argument about pacing is important and shouldn't just be dismissed out of hand as an "element of the genre."

That's just a bit crazy.

Oh man, I really need to finish "Witcher 1"...

The accent at 2:45 was hilarious.

Hmm, the only thing that worried me was that quick-time events thing... do they not listen to ZPR reviews on all other action games?

^Could be. Here's CD Projekt's official word on the matter, which does sound fishy, but not too incriminating:

"Of course, we can't and won't try to deny the facts. The movie that appeared on the various sites yesterday presents our newest project, The Witcher 2, which we've been working on for some time. We made something about half year ago, to present the first playable version of the game." said Adam Kicinski, CEO of CD Projekt RED. "Currently we are looking for a potential publisher (or publishers) for this title, and this leak is an uncontrolled side effect of that process. For today, we are not commenting on anything that concerns the game itself."

2008 games I enjoyed immensely, consider unique, polished pieces of work and I'd recommend to everyone:
Dead Space
Witcher: Enhanced Edition

Honorable mentions:
Audiosurf
Mass Effect for PC (technically a 2007 game)

I can't for the love of me call any more 2008 games 'excellent' though.
For me, all other "AAA" titles were sub par (at times extremely so) in terms of quality that was advertised or I'd expected. Prominent examples include:

GTA4 (a letdown on pretty much all fronts except mini-games or mini-distractions),
Fallout 3 (lame story, complete lack of identification with the protagonist and shitty narrative & voice acting by decent actors bugged me the fock out),
Prince of Persia (cakewalk platforming, random-button-blocking-combat and those FUCKING QTE POWERPLATE SEQUENCES),
Crysis: Warhead & Far Cry 2 & Cod5-World at War all had god-awful storylines, terribly idiotic AIs, and conveyed the feeling that Crytek, Ubi and Treyarch had a competition scoreboard trying to see how many cliches they could squeeze into their games.

I guess I'm hard to please. I keep hoping it'll apply to me in bed some day

Pretty much my thoughts except I thought Oblivion was an abomination.

The main issue I have with Bethesda and Oblivillout is they're not doing any favors for the RPG genre. Somehow, someone over there must have had the wonderfully misguided epiphany that a vast landscape replete with copy pasted locations, derivative, short and disjointed quests (besides the main quest in Fallout 3 which was decent, if not for the fact it ended before it felt it really began), and for the most part pretty similar characters and enemies can replace a carefully paced, far more engaging plot-line a la the Witcher, Deus Ex, Planescape Torment or virtually any older RPG for that matter.

Console fanbois have lapped it up though I hear. Pity, they could have saved a lot of time and achieved the same result by purely plastering a new wall paper over Oblivion and adding in the dismembering of heads.

>> ^firefly:
I'll do it...
promote
(probie needs a boost!)


Thank you very much, good sir/ madame.

In reply to this comment by Zifnab:
I've had no problems using Firefox on multiple systems to view this flash player.

In reply to this comment by WolfDemon:
Has anyone ever gotten this damn flash player to work on Firefox at all?

I'm tired of opening IE just to watch this...

That's really weird that it's just me

In reply to this comment by Kreegath:
Does this mean that those who have already bought the game will have to do so again to get it fixed, or are they releasing a patch or something aswell to mend the shortcomings of the 2007 version?
Nope. For those that already bought and registered the game they will be able to download a huge multi gig patch.

[rant]

Eastern European companies make some of the best new innovative games these days, unfortunately they are contracted to Western publishing houses that force unrealistic publish timeframes.

The Witcher was horribly broken, not because of something overly technical but because the story suffered at the hands of incomplete translation and polish which made me wonder what the fuck I was doing half the goddamn time.

The other guilty party is Armed Assault, a game based and developed by the same people that made Operation Flashpoint. Graphically it was a wank really but Jesus Christ it was broken from AI, to gameplay, to having opponents have the uncanning ability to track you down like wolves. But okay, fair enough OP was the same when it came out, so lets wait for the bazillion patches... oh no! there won't be any! They are already working on Armed Assault 2!

That really pissed me off.

[/rant]

I wonder if Yahtzee will ever touch the enhanced edition?

http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Witcher-Enhanced-Edition-Promo-TrailerInterviews

I agree with you, but to play devil's advocate for the system for a moment, the potential 'upside' from the levelling system is that it keeps things "interesting", since you still have a "challenge" rather than a cakewalk throughout the later game.

It also keeps the random sites/dungeons interesting.

Of course, they could've done the same thing by doing away with the level-dependent enemy strength, and instead mixing up easy and tough places. Controversial choice and on the whole I agree with you, mainly because of the absurdity of finding thieves and bandits sporting glass armour and other riches when this stuff is supposed to be some sort of luxury.

Making things stupider is the fact that the 'other' NPCs don't level up (or at least, not as much... but I think not at all is in fact correct), so guardsmen are liable to get smacked down on higher levels by enemies that would otherwise pose no threat to them. Sad.

At least the bears and wolves seem to have a level cap, eh?

>> ^cybrbeast:
I actually think Morrowind was better, as far as gameplay is concerned, than Oblivion. Oblivion has this stupid leveling system, where basically all the enemies are always about the same strength relative to you. So when you level up, the creatures just do the same. This really robs you of the RPG element of feeling your character getting super strong. And it makes everything too easy. In Morrowind there were areas where you just couldn't go at a low level, except on very risky missions to maybe grab some cool items. In Oblivion is is not even possible to get cool items as a low level, they only start appearing as you level up. In Morrowind you had to work really hard to get a great set of armor together but in oblivion all the good stuff just appears as you level higher. I think all this was done to make it more accessible for the console kiddies.
Modders have tried to fix these problems, but they shouldn't have been there in the first place.

I think the point is that video games have always been viewed as "for kids." When something like this shows up and looks realistic it makes people confused about why they would have that on child entertainment. While I'm opposed to explicit video games, I do feel it's important to remember that games have ratings for the same reasons movies do: to help parents regulate them and make the best decisions for this children. Personally, I stay away from games like this and The Witcher that have adult content because that's my choice for myself.