i can't remember a game other than Half-Life 2 (and maybe The Witcher) where the faces looked good. Neither Morrowing nor Oblivion looked that good on that part. What i liked in Oblivion and it seems is even better in Skyrim are the landscapes.
Mass Effect 2 had some fairly well done faces. Though the scale is completely different, TES games must have random access facial features where more tightly scripted games can have hand designed faces. And I agree, the open world of Oblivion can STILL look pretty damn good for a five year old game.
I'm honestly afraid of what I'll do if D3 miraculously is released this fall. My two favorite game series coinciding...goodbye 4.0
I tend to only really watch movies that I'm pretty sure I'm going to like, but of all the disappointing ones I've watched, the Twilight saga has to be the worst series of films. Terrible acting, and themes that make you question whether tween girls should really be fiending over the movies. Edward is so controlling and demanding while Bella submits to his will that you can't help but wonder what gears these films are turning in young women's minds.
I'll agree that Avatar was rather fluffy. The visuals were great, but come on - I play D1 and D2 regularly, visuals help make something great, they're not the whole reason for existence! I watched it once, the voice of the lead female was very annoying and the story was really predictable. If I actually had to pay to see it, I would have been much more disappointed.
I work at a movie theater, and pretty much the only movies in the last year that I've been tempted to tamper with are the twilight releases. After I screened eclipse to check for bad splices etc I really wanted to just slip in 10 second pieces of Saw trailers at the bad scenes just to fuck with people's heads. I need to find somewhere where I can get a 35mm clip of the laughing skull from the end of Independence Day just so I can stick it in bad movies.
Ahh 007, the game that ruined my ability to play any other FPS on any newer consoles. (I got so used to having a right hand D-pad movement through the c buttons that I could never have the patience to learn to play dual analog on the other systems). If it lets you use a gamecube controller I might play it on the wii at parties and such, but personally I'd rather just deal with outdated graphics and play it on the N64. When you get something right, you don't change it.
Secondly, and this is something I could see happening myself, they can just allow "summoning" of party members. This is how it works in WoW; two party members can summon third. This way there's no way to skip to town, but parties can summon reinforcements with ease. It's child's play to prevent rushing. Just include checks so that you can't pass certain points (like in DII you could skip getting the flail if someone had durance waypoint; this was majorly retarded) and/or a level requirement for certain areas.
This is probably how it is going to be done. However I think that it will probably only require one person to summon another, seeing as we're probably looking at smaller than 8 player games, and it would be no fun to try to play with one friend and have to find someone else to join your game just to get your buddy to the same area. They'll probably make it so that you can teleport someone directly to a waypoint that you have activated, that the other person has sufficient quest status / level to reach. IE if someone has cleared the Den of Evil you could teleport them to the Cold Plains or maybe Stony Field but the Dark Wood would be off limits.
With the focus being shifted away from repetitive endgame grinding, the need for rushes would be far lessened, and I'm glad to see Blizzard taking proactive steps to prevent it.
The OP is mostly right about the most efficient way to start a new ladder season. However, as a player who really dislikes playing a hammerdin, there are several easy substitutions you can make:
Assuming that ubers runs will still be needed (Torches are always good), you can easily make a wind druid that can farm the keys nearly as fast as a hammerdin. It will aslo cost you a little less in item value. Wind druids have dual element damage (cold & physical) so countess & nihil are very rarely totally immune, Though physical immunity does make it take a little while to kill them.
Respeccing throws a wrench into this, but since leveling a smiter kind of sucks, you can use a zealot to kill ubers, assuming that you can get a Death ettin/zerk. Actually there are many builds that can do ubers quite well, frenzy barb being another one that can do it rather easily.
My basic plan for ladder resets is:
1)Start with a blizzard sorc. Easiest character to MF with, and one of my favorites to play. I go right for the occy, skulders & shako build. Good players don't need resists to do Andy, Meph and pindle.
2)Build a key finder, or if you've gotten enough value out of your MFer to buy an unid torch, build an ubers character and start buying keysets for less than the value of an unid torch.
3)With baseline of item value established, it is now time to start playing other classes with wierd builds and doing things that take gear to do. IE, time to start having fun
I've played through it a couple of times; I think it is well worth the $20 price tag. If it were selling for a full 40-50, then I'd say not to buy it. Go into the game expecting to play a cartoon based hack-n-slash and you'll get exactly what you paid for.
It is a little unbalanced (If you play the game on hard or very hard you'll notice 2-3 monster spells kill you in 1-2 hits while everything else barely scratches you) but this makes it quite challenging. The final boss has a pretty epic feeling to it, but the storyline surely was thrown together in 20 mins.
The US treasury is not in debt, we the tax payers are, all of this came at our expense. I'm not sure how the treasury profited but I am sure how the FED did. It's an entity that is tax exempt, has never been audited, is privately held by some of the largest banks in the world such as JP Morgan Chase (it's largest holder). It makes money by the interest it charges for loaning money the banks.What have they fixed that is going to ensure we don't see another crisis?
Hmm I guess I have to concede ignorance on this. I was under the impression that the US treasury receives all taxes, and authorizes / disperses all funds to government programs, and that it calculated the national debt. Skimming through wikipedia articles for Us Treasury Department and the FED I'm led to belive that the actual debt is owed by one or shared by both these instiutions. I'm just having a hard time picturing that the debt is assessed to the people, and not to a governmental agency. Can you elaborate on this a bit, or point me to somewhere that explains it? No sarcasim or anything here, just genuine curiosity; most of my knowledge is in math and CS, I don't know a whole lot about high level government & economics so some nuiances are easily lost on me
I'm gonna use my current processor and HDD, and I only have one PCIe x16 slot available, so no SLI. Now I have two concerns. One the case, if I don't need to, I won't upgrade it. I've been looking everywhere for adding fans to this thing, or at least replacing the stock ones, but there is no info on 'em. I assume I will need to pull it apart and measure.
How many fans does your current case have? Do you have issues with heat as is? Remember to create a flow of air, you ideally want both exhaust and intake fans. If you're a little bit crafty, you can easily mod old cases and put 80mm fans just about anywhere with a pair of tin snips and a drill. If you have big hands and are clumsy like me, it wont be pretty looking, but it is simple to add fans to places where there used to be sheet metal
Unless you have heat issues now, I probably wouldn't worry so much about the case. The only real thing you seem to be upgrading is the VC, which while it does generate significant heat, typically will have its own heatsink & fan. So if your case has even somewhat decent airflow you should be fine.
If you read what he said carefully, he actually makes no mention as to whether they are planning BoE to be character or account. We can infer that he was talking about binding to characters, but can't really be sure.
The other thing to consider, is that it looks like they ARE planning to use gold as the preferred player to player currency. I would hope this also means that if high end items are indeed bound to characters that they would be able to be sold for very high amounts of gold.
Robert Kiyosaki lays down nearly all the conditions that exist the news is not considering at the moment.
I'm not sure that it's wise to wholly accept this article at face value. Like much of his other writings, it is highly anecdotal and offers little in the form of proof or proper justification. Some of what he says does make sense and can be reasonably deduced through common sense, but other aspects are pretty far off the wall.
I may be completely missing something, but to me it is plain inane to say:
2. In my view, this global crisis has been caused by the Federal Reserve Bank, the U.S. Treasury, Wall Street, and the central banks of the world. They caused the problem, profited excessively in doing so, and now profit by being asked to fix the problem.
when the US treasury is laughably far in debt. Profited excessively? Maybe it is a mistake in article structure but as it stands that statement is just messed up.
I'm also having a hard time discerning who his target audience is: just who is he telling to prepare for the worst, and what does he hope to accomplish by it? If he is trying to tell the average investor to simply be cautious with their money, it is commendable advice but likely falls on deaf ears. What kind of person who has money available for investment actually needs to be told that? If he is telling people to not invest, and to be ready for a market collapse then it is possible that he has forgotten a key concept of our market: it needs steady investors to stay afloat. If people start pulling cash out en-masse, we'll see a bear for sure. Without it, it is only a possibility. My personal thought is that he really has no target audience; and that like much of his other work, it is a whole lot of fluff with not a lot of point or useability.
Something I've not yet seen in this thread, is the impact that no TPs will have on rushing, and group play. Unless there is a way to "Share" waypoints, there really will be no way or reason to rush a character, but it will also make "pick up" groups more difficult because if someone doesn't have a WP to the right area, they'll have to run from the closest one they've got. I'm looking forward to no rushing and playing through the game with each character, but I'm worried that a solution to my above group play problem may accidentally give rise to rushing techniques.
I like the idea of no TPs, its remincint of the first few levels of D1, where you had to pick and choose what you would carry back to town, or you had to walk a very long distance to make repeated trips (at least until you bought the first TP scroll) In D2 it was kinda overdone, it was way too easy to go back and forth.
The soulstones were created to imprison the prime evils in sanctuary right? And to unleash their power the prime evils needed a medium to act as their body. Those two things are certain. But that may only be true in sanctuary. I mean, Diablo should not need a soulstone to exist in Hell, because he's existed there far before being imprisoned. So I believe that without a soulstone, the prime evils can't manifest in Sanctuary, but be as powerful (if not even stronger) in Hell. What I mean is, they might not die until they're killed in Hell, where their original forms reside. So basically, the plot might end with the Heroes actually travelling to Hell to kill Diablo in his home ground, thus exterminating him for good (I don't count the River of flame as the actual Hell).
In the D2 cinematics, didn't the hero destroy Diablo's soulstone on the hellforge? We know mephisto's was destroyed, and I think Diablo's was as well. Unless they reverse the lore, D and M can't make a comeback, as shattering a soulstone on the hellforge was supposed to destory the essence contained within.
Also, they don't need soulstones to exist in sanctuary, three soulstones were given to the Horadrim by Tyreal to imprison the prime evils because they were in the mortal plane. While there, the demons possessed mortals to suit their ends, but they could also influence thoughts and emotions without a physical form(Think of Diablo corrupting Lazarus while still in the Stone) . The Horadrim had to chase down and kill the the mortals to release the "essence" of the demons so that they could trap them in the soulstones, as they were immune to it while possessing a soul.
ATM I can't remember what happened to Baal's stone at the end of LoD, and I don't have time to go watch the cines right now. But I don't think Meph or Diablo can come back without something somewhere saying "Oh shit, when we destroyed the soulstones it really just sets them free", which would make sense if Belial was masquerading as Tyreal.
What about the people who didn't play 'most builds'? You know, the ones who were trying to have fun, rather than just be the best?
I don't know, it seems like at every turn Blizzard is catering to the people who play with few characters with specific builds rather than the people who enjoy making as many characters as possible who all differ from each other as much as possible. Meh.
You can still do that in D3. Think of it this way, in D2 you had 3 paths to customization: Stats, Skills, and gear. In D3 you will have 3 paths to customization: Skills, Runes and gear. They're just changing it around a little bit.
As of yet, I can't see anything stopping you from making a melee oriented witch doctor except that he has to use 1h weps. You'll just have to select the right Skills, the right runes and the right gear, as opposed to how in D2 you had to select the right stats, skills and gear.
In D2 your stats were primarily a means to use your gear, get block % and improve your HP. They wern't much fun and were kind of monotonous to use. You just kind of got what you needed and moved on, they didn't change the way you played much.
If you're going to get a new computer, the best bang for your buck is to assemble it yourself. It takes a little bit of reading, but overall it is pretty simple. (I had a harder time putting together my desk with labeled plans than assembling my PC through internet-based guides) Companies such as Dell, Alienware etc make excellent products, but they contain just about the same parts you can buy online and charge far far more than the sum total of the parts. When I built my PC 3.5 years ago, it ran me about $1,100 us for all the parts. I priced equivolent models from dell & alienware at around $2,000 to $2,200. For something that took about a couple hours of tinkering and ~7-8 hours of researching parts & guides, i think thats well worth the price.
Of course, those companies also typically offer warrenties and such so if you feel thats needed then yea you may want to stick with them. Most parts do have manufacturers gurentees though, so if you catch it malfuctioning quickly & know its that part, you can generally get replacements.
You can probably build rigs equivolent to what they had at blizzcon for about $1000 or less. No idea what the specs are, but my wager is that those are rented rigs that are shuffled between conventions, schools etc. They're not likely tippy top of the line, but I could be completly wrong.
I think most of my dissappointment at Blizzcon comes from confirmation that Cataclysm will be the 2010 release. I was quietly hoping that we'd see D3 in late 2010, but that hope is understandably gone now.
With the 2011+ release plan, the amount of info they released feels just about right. The game is still far enough off that it doesn't warrant much more than what they gave us. It is also always cool to have a little bit of insight into how to develop the games.
I'm really impressed with some of the info they gave on B.net 2.0, particularly the SC2 league system. I can't wait for that to come out, it looks like an amazing way to rank players.
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Mass Effect 2 had some fairly well done faces. Though the scale is completely different, TES games must have random access facial features where more tightly scripted games can have hand designed faces. And I agree, the open world of Oblivion can STILL look pretty damn good for a five year old game.
I'm honestly afraid of what I'll do if D3 miraculously is released this fall. My two favorite game series coinciding...goodbye 4.0
I'll agree that Avatar was rather fluffy. The visuals were great, but come on - I play D1 and D2 regularly, visuals help make something great, they're not the whole reason for existence! I watched it once, the voice of the lead female was very annoying and the story was really predictable. If I actually had to pay to see it, I would have been much more disappointed.
I work at a movie theater, and pretty much the only movies in the last year that I've been tempted to tamper with are the twilight releases. After I screened eclipse to check for bad splices etc I really wanted to just slip in 10 second pieces of Saw trailers at the bad scenes just to fuck with people's heads. I need to find somewhere where I can get a 35mm clip of the laughing skull from the end of Independence Day just so I can stick it in bad movies.
This is probably how it is going to be done. However I think that it will probably only require one person to summon another, seeing as we're probably looking at smaller than 8 player games, and it would be no fun to try to play with one friend and have to find someone else to join your game just to get your buddy to the same area. They'll probably make it so that you can teleport someone directly to a waypoint that you have activated, that the other person has sufficient quest status / level to reach. IE if someone has cleared the Den of Evil you could teleport them to the Cold Plains or maybe Stony Field but the Dark Wood would be off limits.
With the focus being shifted away from repetitive endgame grinding, the need for rushes would be far lessened, and I'm glad to see Blizzard taking proactive steps to prevent it.
Assuming that ubers runs will still be needed (Torches are always good), you can easily make a wind druid that can farm the keys nearly as fast as a hammerdin. It will aslo cost you a little less in item value. Wind druids have dual element damage (cold & physical) so countess & nihil are very rarely totally immune, Though physical immunity does make it take a little while to kill them.
Respeccing throws a wrench into this, but since leveling a smiter kind of sucks, you can use a zealot to kill ubers, assuming that you can get a Death ettin/zerk. Actually there are many builds that can do ubers quite well, frenzy barb being another one that can do it rather easily.
My basic plan for ladder resets is:
1)Start with a blizzard sorc. Easiest character to MF with, and one of my favorites to play. I go right for the occy, skulders & shako build. Good players don't need resists to do Andy, Meph and pindle.
2)Build a key finder, or if you've gotten enough value out of your MFer to buy an unid torch, build an ubers character and start buying keysets for less than the value of an unid torch.
3)With baseline of item value established, it is now time to start playing other classes with wierd builds and doing things that take gear to do. IE, time to start having fun
It is a little unbalanced (If you play the game on hard or very hard you'll notice 2-3 monster spells kill you in 1-2 hits while everything else barely scratches you) but this makes it quite challenging. The final boss has a pretty epic feeling to it, but the storyline surely was thrown together in 20 mins.
Hmm I guess I have to concede ignorance on this. I was under the impression that the US treasury receives all taxes, and authorizes / disperses all funds to government programs, and that it calculated the national debt. Skimming through wikipedia articles for Us Treasury Department and the FED I'm led to belive that the actual debt is owed by one or shared by both these instiutions. I'm just having a hard time picturing that the debt is assessed to the people, and not to a governmental agency. Can you elaborate on this a bit, or point me to somewhere that explains it? No sarcasim or anything here, just genuine curiosity; most of my knowledge is in math and CS, I don't know a whole lot about high level government & economics so some nuiances are easily lost on me
How many fans does your current case have? Do you have issues with heat as is? Remember to create a flow of air, you ideally want both exhaust and intake fans. If you're a little bit crafty, you can easily mod old cases and put 80mm fans just about anywhere with a pair of tin snips and a drill. If you have big hands and are clumsy like me, it wont be pretty looking, but it is simple to add fans to places where there used to be sheet metal
Unless you have heat issues now, I probably wouldn't worry so much about the case. The only real thing you seem to be upgrading is the VC, which while it does generate significant heat, typically will have its own heatsink & fan. So if your case has even somewhat decent airflow you should be fine.
The other thing to consider, is that it looks like they ARE planning to use gold as the preferred player to player currency. I would hope this also means that if high end items are indeed bound to characters that they would be able to be sold for very high amounts of gold.
I'm not sure that it's wise to wholly accept this article at face value. Like much of his other writings, it is highly anecdotal and offers little in the form of proof or proper justification. Some of what he says does make sense and can be reasonably deduced through common sense, but other aspects are pretty far off the wall.
I may be completely missing something, but to me it is plain inane to say: when the US treasury is laughably far in debt. Profited excessively? Maybe it is a mistake in article structure but as it stands that statement is just messed up.
I'm also having a hard time discerning who his target audience is: just who is he telling to prepare for the worst, and what does he hope to accomplish by it? If he is trying to tell the average investor to simply be cautious with their money, it is commendable advice but likely falls on deaf ears. What kind of person who has money available for investment actually needs to be told that? If he is telling people to not invest, and to be ready for a market collapse then it is possible that he has forgotten a key concept of our market: it needs steady investors to stay afloat. If people start pulling cash out en-masse, we'll see a bear for sure. Without it, it is only a possibility. My personal thought is that he really has no target audience; and that like much of his other work, it is a whole lot of fluff with not a lot of point or useability.
I like the idea of no TPs, its remincint of the first few levels of D1, where you had to pick and choose what you would carry back to town, or you had to walk a very long distance to make repeated trips (at least until you bought the first TP scroll) In D2 it was kinda overdone, it was way too easy to go back and forth.
In the D2 cinematics, didn't the hero destroy Diablo's soulstone on the hellforge? We know mephisto's was destroyed, and I think Diablo's was as well. Unless they reverse the lore, D and M can't make a comeback, as shattering a soulstone on the hellforge was supposed to destory the essence contained within.
Also, they don't need soulstones to exist in sanctuary, three soulstones were given to the Horadrim by Tyreal to imprison the prime evils because they were in the mortal plane. While there, the demons possessed mortals to suit their ends, but they could also influence thoughts and emotions without a physical form(Think of Diablo corrupting Lazarus while still in the Stone) . The Horadrim had to chase down and kill the the mortals to release the "essence" of the demons so that they could trap them in the soulstones, as they were immune to it while possessing a soul.
ATM I can't remember what happened to Baal's stone at the end of LoD, and I don't have time to go watch the cines right now. But I don't think Meph or Diablo can come back without something somewhere saying "Oh shit, when we destroyed the soulstones it really just sets them free", which would make sense if Belial was masquerading as Tyreal.
You can still do that in D3. Think of it this way, in D2 you had 3 paths to customization: Stats, Skills, and gear. In D3 you will have 3 paths to customization: Skills, Runes and gear. They're just changing it around a little bit.
As of yet, I can't see anything stopping you from making a melee oriented witch doctor except that he has to use 1h weps. You'll just have to select the right Skills, the right runes and the right gear, as opposed to how in D2 you had to select the right stats, skills and gear.
In D2 your stats were primarily a means to use your gear, get block % and improve your HP. They wern't much fun and were kind of monotonous to use. You just kind of got what you needed and moved on, they didn't change the way you played much.
Of course, those companies also typically offer warrenties and such so if you feel thats needed then yea you may want to stick with them. Most parts do have manufacturers gurentees though, so if you catch it malfuctioning quickly & know its that part, you can generally get replacements.
You can probably build rigs equivolent to what they had at blizzcon for about $1000 or less. No idea what the specs are, but my wager is that those are rented rigs that are shuffled between conventions, schools etc. They're not likely tippy top of the line, but I could be completly wrong.
With the 2011+ release plan, the amount of info they released feels just about right. The game is still far enough off that it doesn't warrant much more than what they gave us. It is also always cool to have a little bit of insight into how to develop the games.
I'm really impressed with some of the info they gave on B.net 2.0, particularly the SC2 league system. I can't wait for that to come out, it looks like an amazing way to rank players.