stoffe

Someone bringing a suggestion up and nobody speaking out against it within a reasonable time given to respond, I'd guess. Don't think there are any formal processes for appointing staff, at least not that I'm aware of. Should give people a week to voice their opinion, if they so choose. I've received PMs from a few more people regarding this. I've not replied since I don't have anything meaningful to say yet, but I've read them.

While it's not up to me to decide, it might be handy for the powers that be (if there still be any) if you would do a design mockup, outline sketch or conceptual demo of how you would envision a new more modern design and layout for lucasforums. Just a thought. At least I'd be curious to see.

It has been received and brought up in the staff forum. Just remains to see if there are enough people still around to discuss it and have an opinion. Might take a little while. Generally speaking, if there are people with time and motivation to do something and skills within something like server system administration (linux, bsd), html/css/js web design, vBulletin template creation, PHP programming/MySQL databases or willingness to run and maintain game fansites, I'm sure you would be appreciated and hopefully not go ignored.

Indeed, if you want to get the most out of the game storywise you should increase your Wisdom, Intelligence and Charisma as early as possible. (I'd go with 18 INT and WIS and the rest in Charisma at character creation). The mental stats of the Nameless One are very significant for what options are available in dialogue throughout the game, and high Wisdom boosts your XP gain a lot, making you level up faster (XP bonus is not retroactive so you want high WIS early). Once your mental stats are in a good spot you can put more into Constitution which will increase your health pool and make you regen health faster. You can also use tattoos from Fell's parlor to boost stats as needed, once you can afford them. While this does make you physically weak early on you can get other party members who are good at fighting to do the heavy lifting in combat for you. There is no mandatory combat in the Mortuary aside from killing one zombie for a key in the first room, if you choose your words and actions carefully. Seek out Mebbeth in Ragpickers Square as soon as you get out of the Mortuary, she can train you to become a Mage. Spell buffs can make up for your physical weakness somewhat. Also getting disabling AoE spells makes taking on groups of enemies much easier early on. Pacify at lvl 1 (puts enemies to sleep) and Horror at lvl 2 (makes them run around like headless chickens) are both good ones that can keep entire groups of foes from fighting back while your frontliners hack them to pieces. Also pick up Dakkon at the Smoldering Corpse bar ASAP, between him and Morte you should be able to manage most fights without much trouble. When you have 18 INT and 19 WIS you can talk to him about the Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon. With those stats you will be able to unlock and comprehend all 8 circles, which will boost Dakkon's physical stats significantly (and give you some free spells).

Baldurs Gate II (Shadows of Amn+Throne of Bhaal) is a more traditional RPG in the sense that there is lots of fighting and a good bit of dialogue. It's a fairly standard D&D fantasy RPG set in the Forgotten Realms. It is still to date the longest game I've ever played, clocking roughly 200 hours for a "completionist" playthrough exporing everything and doing all the side quests. If you're looking for conventional sword&sorcery medieval fantasy epic with elves and dwarves, taking your character from humble beginnings to epic levels (and potentially beyond), this would be the #1 choice. Planescape:Torment is more of an interactive novel than an RPG in essence. It is extremely dialogue focused and while it has combat it takes the back seat and is fairly lackluster compared to the fighting in BG2. The dialog and writing is great though, and many dialog choices have consequences, great or small. The Planescape setting can take a while getting used to and is rather weird compared to standard high fantasy, but it fits the mood and theme of the plot very well. I'm currently replaying PS:Torment and it's still as good as I remembered it. If you want to try it Torment is available on Good Old Games (http://www.gog.com). GOG also has a link to a number of essential mods that make the game work on modern computers, allowing widescreen resolution and interface adjustments to accomodate it, along with various bug fixes (standard PS:Torment is locked to 640x480 screen resolution which looks horrible on modern monitors, and if you don't play it fullscreen the cinematics won't work) so be sure to get those as well. They're all easy to use, coming with installers. The game runs very well for me in 1920x1080 under Windows 7 64 with the modded GOG version. If you do play Torment, a simple piece of advice that will make the game much more enjoyable, to avoid a mistake many people seem to do when playing the game the first time: Don't approach the character building as your typical combat-focused RPG. Due to the extremely heavy emphasis on dialog you should focus on the "brainy" stats (WIS/INT/CHA) primarily, rather than the brawny ones (STR/DEX/CON). Wisdom boosts your experience gain from everything you do, Intelligence allows you to recover more memories throughout the game, and all three unlock additional dialog options, paths and solutions to quests and interactions. It also allows you to improve some of your party members, and affects what endings are available to you. Toward the end of the game you'll want those stats to be at superhuman levels (optimally 24+ CHA and 22+ INT/WIS). I'd put 18 INT, 18 WIS and the rest into CHA at the start of the game. You get 1 more attribute point to assign any time you level up, and you can get boosts to various attributes via dialogue and some artifacts throughout the game as well. Your character may be physically weaker early on this way, but you'll soon be able to pick up party members to compensate, and if you train to be a Mage as soon as you have to opportunity your high INT will be an asset in battle as well. If you don't do this and play as a strong dumb fighter you'll miss out on substantial chunks of the game. * * * If you're looking for some Infinity Engine nostalgia I'd pick up both those games, they are radically different in both play style and story and are both very good games. If you have to pick just one, I'd go with Torment just for the novelty of it. I haven't come across any other game quite like it yet. Unless you don't enjoy reading lots and lots of dialogue text, then Torment isn't for you.

It was just some trouble with the provider hosting the lucasforums server, no server crashes or such this time. It has been resolved.

Maybe I'm getting old, but I currently don't really have any games that I'm looking forward to and can't wait to play. Maybe the final Starcraft II expansion since I'm curious to see where the campaign storyline goes, but that's hardly preorder material either. All the big franchises and series I've followed have either ended of fizzled out into mediocrity. Mostly trying "new" games I'm being recommended and hoping for a pleasant surprise.

We're currently experiencing some technical difficulties with the host of the starwarsknights.com site which those tools are located on. The service provider is working on resolving it but for some reason it seems to be taking an awfully long time. But they should hopefully be available again within a few days.

Sid Meier's Mass Effect 4? If it's going to be set in the mass effect universe people are familiar with it'll have to take place just before the Reaper storyline started, since there isn't much left afterward in most endings, and they'd have to make one ending canon (since the fate of the whole galaxy differs significantly enough between endings) which would piss off even more people. Still if they do Wrex could probably show up as well since Krogan seems to have as long lifespans as asari do (unless they get killed first). Unless it's a zombie apocalypse game and you play as a reanimated undead Shepard.

Personally I liked Ðragon Age II well enough. It was different from Origins, but still fun. Some of it was worse than the predecessor, other things were better. While most games do this to some extent, in Ðragon Age II it done so overtly it was glaring. A better mix of new and recycled, and more effort taken to conceal reuse of areas, would indeed be nice. I'm a bit mixed on this. The ability for your character to build a distinct personality, which was then reflected in dialogs, cutscenes and even ambient oneliners, was a very nice touch (joker-Hawke is still my favorite). Having spoken lines for the protagonist, instead of just a nodding mute, was also a large improvement. Though the dialog wheel did suffer from some of the same vagueness as it does in the Mass Effect games. It's not always obvious what your character will say or do when a particular option is picked. This could've been solved as easily as displaying what will be said in a popup tooltip if you hover the mouse over a response option. Given the plot of Ðragon Age II it is understandable why they did it. It's hard to tell a character-centric story if the protagonist could come from vastly different cultures and backgrounds. So while it does annoy me slightly (like the fixed nature of the Nameless One i PS:Torment did), I understood why they did it, and it was not enough to ruin the game for me. Variable character size makes for a major headache when doing animations that's supposed to interact with another character or object. In Skyrim they solved it by resizing characters to the default size whenever they interacted with something, but that ended up looking silly too when an Altmer suddenly shrunk as soon as they sat down on a chair or leaned against a wall I suppose the only real options here with the current technology is to either use the same character size for everyone (ÐA2), resize on the fly (Skyrim) or not use character animations that interact with other characters or game world objects (Guild Wars 2), or make a number of fixed body sizes and then make animation combos for all the different body sizes interacting with each other and game objects, which would increase the amount of animation required exponentially, which isn't really worth the time and effort. It's a Bioware game, most of their games have a strictly linear main plot, and while you may be able to say different things, and in some cases choose between quests, you always end up in the same place. Makes for good storytelling, though at the cost of player participation.

I'm mostly using appearance-enhancing mods and new clothing/armor mods, as well as the PC Exclusive Animation Path and a ton of animation mods that makes my character move differently from everyone else. A few mods other than those already mentioned I can recommend: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/17605 http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/12092 Dragon Bone Weapons Complete (it's not on Nexus any more, just the Steam workshop) http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/1002 http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/9717 Don't tell the court mage in Solitude that, since she by all accounts is a vampire (try the Detect Dead spell near her). If you want to kill vampires the Dawnguard DLC can still be worthwhile if you join the Dawnguard, since they're vampire hunter fanatics who's got plenty of work for you to deal with bloodsuckers. (Even though you'll be forced to work with a vampire, and even briefly become one, during the Dawnguard plotline.) If you do get it, pick up the Better Vampires mod linked above and use it to reverse the vampiric condition so it makes more sense (i.e. being strongest when you're newly fed). Well, there is that. But then you'd need to stock up on a lifetime supply of eclipse arrows for Auriel's Bow first, since Vamp-Serana is the only one who can make them.

TES:Sims? Sounds a bit like the Keep management section in Neverwinter Nights 2 too, which I wasn't horribly fond of. I think I prefer roaming around adventuring. If I want an estate it would presumably be better to use the Creation Kit to make one, since it would be more like I wanted it that way. Got Dawnguard and was satisfied with it (even though some things could have been fleshed out a bit more), but from what I've seen Hearthfire doesn't appeal to me. I think they should focus on making more full-blown quest arcs as DLC, since that's the one bit where the modding community is a bit weak in producing fully voiced quality content. Wouldn't that technically be necrophilia, since she's (un)dead and all? You'll have to wait until you're the new emperor of Tamriel before you start another dynasty of dragonborns.

Me (and lexx) are on the Aurora Glade server. If anyone is around and want to team up doing something send a whisper or ingame mail. My account name is stoffe.1920.

So, Guild Wars 2 release tomorrow (25th) for those with headstart access is approaching. Anyone here who's going to play the game? I will probably be on the Aurora Glade server unless someone has a better suggestion.

Not much room for backstories for a sylvari character since they're quite literally born during the tutorial following character creation. (Sylvari are plant beings that are "born" from the Pale Tree as full-grown adults with a sort of collective racial memory that teaches them certain skills and knowledge about the world from the start. Though they tend to still be quite naive and regard the world with the wide-eyed wonder of a small child. The first sylvari was born into the world only 35 years prior to the events of the game, so they're a quite young race.)

My Sylvari necromancer: Show spoiler (hidden content - requires Javascript to show) Sylvari are kind of noble (if somewhat naive) so if you want to see guardians as knight/paladin types (which they aren't quite) it might be a decent match.

I will be playing Guild Wars 2, but most likely on an EU server due to lag issues, and the combat system being somewhat sensitive to lag. With the Guesting system it won't really matter what your home server is though except for PvP, since you can hop onto another server and play with your friends there whenever you wish.

Probably not many Jedi or Sith to be found in the Coruscant slums.

In my opinion it wasn't. Of the three Elder Scrolls games I've played (not counting expansion packs, but counting essential mods) Oblivion was probably the one I liked the least. Morrowind was great because of its storyline and exotic setting, but less so due to the uninspiring quest structure and being a bit too much hands-off in letting you figure out on your own where to go and what to do, encouraging Play-by-Wiki gameplay. Many of the dungeon instances (Ancestral Tombs in particular) were also quite boring to explore since they rarely ever turned out to have any reason for you to enter them. The lack of fast travel (aside from boats, stilt striders and mages guild teleports), while making the world more immersive also became a bit of a chore after a while, when you had to traverse the same pieces of already explored and cleared ground over and over, going back and forth doing quests (or searching for quest objectives), especially combined with the snails pace movement speed before getting a respectable Athletics rank. Later on with high athletics and jump/slowfall potions moving about became much less of an issue though. Jumping halfway across the continent in a single leap was quite handy. Oblivion had pretty landscapes, but they were a bit too mundane overall to impress me (not counting Shivering Isles). It would probably have been better if they stuck with the lore version of Cyrodiil, making it a vast jungle, rather than the Medieval Europe it was transformed into in Oblivion. The main plot was also very uninspiring to me. In Morrowind and Skyrim your character is Somebody (Nerevarine, Dragonborn). In Oblivion you were cast as the Somebody's errand girl, and remained there for the rest of the storyline while Martin Septim was the one who was essential for moving things along (again not counting Shivering Isles). The loss of the open world (with Cities now being instanced), copypaste dungeons and loss of flight/jump magic also annoyed me a little. The horrible user interface compared to Morrowind also didn't do the game any favors. Skyrim improved on graphics further and fixed some of the flaws of the previous games. More varied environments, more distinct dungeons, more interesting and unique quests (aside from the Radiant FedEx quests), Shout magic, and you're back to being someone special again. On the down side they managed to make the user interface in Skyrim even worse than the one in Oblivion, and they dumbed down the game system perhaps a bit too much (for good or ill). The main plot was also more interesting, but a bit too short IMO.

"We anticipate that very few subscribers, after having received multiple alerts, will persist in being subscribers,” That's my guess, that people will abandon these intrusive, insulting companies and use more respectable internet providers. If they lose all their customers the problem will sort itself out. Unless people nowadays are being OK with companies and private interests spying on them without any oversight, accountability and rules, unlike the police. Doesn't matter if you do something "bad" or not, they won't even know if you do before they've already violated your privacy. It's none of these companies business what you are doing online. I guess they're going to start listening to everyone's phone calls, opening everyone's mail, do random strip searches in public places and search people's homes too to make sure that they don't do anything bad. And everyone who has nothing to hide should be OK with that, right?

The husks you have to fight when Shepard drags herself into the beam wasn't there before you got knocked out either. They might be responsible for gathering up the bodies for beam transport. As for re-using art assets, I doubt it was very high priority to give each individual corpse, that most players won't even notice, a unique appearance. Generic corpses are copypaste throughout the trilogy. As for the white and pink armor (that Ashley isn't wearing in ME3 any more), I doubt the Systems Alliance would give each lowly infantrymen guarding backwater colonies unique and customized armor. Thus it would stand to reason that her armor was standard issue for SA troops of her rank and function, and that thus a lot more of those would be present on an Earth under attack.

You can't base the ending of the whole trilogy on something that might happen in the Arrival DLC though, since Shepard's participation in the Arrival scenario is optional. If you didn't play the DLC a squad of marines sent by Hackett carried out the mission instead in ME3 (getting wiped out in the process). Going by what is said and mentioned in the games (and not any comics and novels), both these gentlemen also spent several months in close proximity to a Reaper (Inside Sovereign, and just upstairs from the embryo). Indoctrination is not a quick process, it is mentioned that it takes weeks or months to do properly. There is a Quick Indoctrination option as well, but using that the victim goes insane within a few days so it's not really an option for sleepers and long-term operatives, or a Shepard that seemingly remains herself 6 months later. The conduit (if you mean the beam up to the Citadel) was a transporter beam meant to move organic material up to the Citadel for processing for use in Reaper construction. Thus it's not unreasonable IMO that husks etc continue to shovel up bodies, especially since a fair number of them just were produced nearby with the failed rush attack. There is no such thing in established lore. See above.

The release date for Guild Wars 2 has now finally been set and announced. 28th of August this year; in two months. Early access starts on 25th of August for those who pre-purchased the game. Hopefully enough time to iron out the last few bugs and oddities and make some needed balancing tweaks, as evidenced by the public beta weekends held so far. One more Beta Weekend Event has also been announced starting 20th of July.

You can't. Unfortunately the mislabeled "Do not auto-update" option really means "do not auto-update until the next time Steam is started", at which point it will do so no matter what (and change the setting back to the default value) unless you're in Offline Mode. It's in the Steam rules that its managed products always should be updated to the latest release version, because Valve knows what is best for you (even if it messes up your game in the process due to mod/patch incompatibilities like in Skyrim, or if it starts a 1 hour download when you had half an hour to spare wanting to play a game).