Personally, I think the idea of a world transfer is fantastic. It should not be needed often, but sometimes you end up wanting to move all of your MMOG playing from one server to the other and certain (lazy, greedy) companies charge you $25.00 per character to do this!

As for GW2, I do not know what to make of it - GW, at least when I tried it years ago, was so crude and limited that, though free, turned me away from ever going back to it. Currently, I am burnt out on the WoW player base and ToR just is not that much fun to play so I will be canceling it before the next renewal. I am mildly curious as to whether or not GW2 will be a solid game, though I will likely wait until numerous reviews are out before I consider purchasing it.
Though purchasing it once is a nice idea in and of itself.
Feeling more and more like I am just waiting for Titan,
Ray

This comment was edited on Apr 25, 2012, 19:08.

I played the SP far more than the MP, but it was not that impressive. It was not terrible, but it was not amazing and it kind of wore you down with its tediousness over time.

I would almost think they would be better off as a small budget/kickstarter title than a full sequel.
And I already played the RPG version: Skyriim.
Preferring something new, but taking this over another BW title,
Ray

Was Steam running before or after you lost internet access? I don't know if they ever bothered to fix this, but the program previously could only go either offline or online mode at startup and could not switch after being launched.
The offline mode is there, but not handled well.
Otherwise, contrary to what it claims, some actions (typically authentication, certain points of updating, some patching) do require online status before they can go any further.

Glad that it at least pre-fills my age on restricted materials now,
Ray

So the world gets a plague and this one guy, after getting infected by somebody with an arms-only version of the plague, decides to blame the plague on just one the one guy, but decides to make an emo jump off a building and kill some non-infected people beforehand?

Obviously, that is not a correct interpretation of the video, but it shows how little it explains the world and how it does nothing to sell me on the actual game. The first game never seemed appealing to me and the mediocre scores made me skip it outright. A new emo video about two bitter arms-only plague carriers has not done anything further to sell me on this series.
Is the third game about two dudes fighting over e-peens?
Guessing it should get points for not being yet another military shooter,
Ray

I guess this will keep the tweens happy, but it just seems like another generic military shooter.

What, specifically, was unique about this one?
The lack of originality, depth, and complexity?
Shrugging,
Ray

.

I am a terrible person - I've seen the game's title pop up here and there, but I just wrote it off as another indie fad.

Noting the comments, I checked out the website and watched the demo video...and immediately purchased it. This looks like a good, straight forwarded classic PC dungeon crawler. Huzzah!
Nice, clean look to it, too.
Edit: "MapViewOfFile failed." /Sigh /DamnIndies
Edit 2: Ninja-patch fixed my issue. Back to Huzzah!

Down to a handful of quests in Skyrim; going to be playing this soon,
Ray

This comment was edited on Apr 11, 2012, 21:18.

It is not beloved by the masses, but Crysis 2 was actually one of the better shooters I have played in recent memory. I had to reset my expectations slightly, but it had some letal enemies, could be played as a stealth game or a pure action romp, looked great, had some unique set pieces, had useful weapons, and I did have a sense of completing something at the end of it.

It is not Far Cry, but it did rework the terrible aliens from the prior game. Part of it is the drastic change in tone that the first game took; it was abundantly clear that Crysis was going to move away from the "open world" approach.
And have you seen Far Cry? It is trying to kill itself.
Enjoying it as a shooter,
Ray

Remember, CCP can only afford to have about four people working on this these days...
Maybe it can get the Dust 514 crew once that bombs.
That aside, this just seems a bit underwhelming. It is a continuation of what we have seen before and does nothing to reall detail the scop of the world, the gameplay, player interaction, etc.

Fearing this property will rot while CCP tries to patch up Eve,
Ray

Well...hopefully this is not the case, but this really was never much of a sequel to Prey. That aside, it would have taken a fair amount of skill and work to ensure that this was a deep, open, sandbox-style world in contrast with just having numerous "run and gun" levels.
Even then, would it have tested well with the CoD/BF players?
Guessing time will tell,
Ray

Rumors are the 680 was going to be the mainstream performance model, but that AMD's new line was so lackluster that the 680 was able to compete with the 7970. As such, we were stripped of a mainstream card and Nvidia is allowed to slap a $500.00 tag on it.

AMD will be pushing a dual-GPU solution and trying to come out with some faster models, but NvIdiA already has its own dual-GPU solution in the works and - again, based on rumors - the true high end card from nvidia trounces anything AMD can come up with.

That aside...I just purchased a 7870. I was running a 2GB 6950, but my wife got a new system so I tossed that into hers and bought the 7870 for $350. As others have noted, there is no real need for this, especially on the PC side of things, and I would not have purchased this if not for the overall situation. And a $500 card? Two $500 cards? A $800+ card? Forget it.
New cards with $$$ premiums just barely beating year old cards. Yay.
Nothing that the $300+ market has to wait another two months or so for its model,
Ray

There are special circumstances, but I encourage any random Windows user to use MSE. It's free, it adds some basic protection, and it has no real impact on performance.

It is the one program I do run and it has never caused the conflicts, delays, or errors that the more intrusive programs cause - various AV programs, various firewalls, and now (sadly) stupid ZA that wants to be running all the game.
Toss in Spybody S&D and basic intelligence and you have a win PC.
Not having a single complaint regarding MSE,
Ray

Arkane has evolved with every release and I am definitely intrigued by the idea of Thief in City 17.

I just hope there really are a number of open world/sandbox routes to takes and that the do not simultaneously break the game by making any kill stupidly easy.
Not that the powers will not already do that...
Wanting my GTX 680 reviews ,
Ray

On the whole, most of the options from the frist two games were carried through, but there are definitely a few items that were just dropped outright!

Additionally, some of the female options are off - eyes are not aligned, hair is placed too high for some of the faces, etc. If you have a famale shepard with the layered bob hairstyle (as mine did,) it is quite different than how it looked in ME2.
Kind of sh*tty given this is a game when you carry over characters.
Thinking this was particularly lazy on BioWare's part,
Ray

I had to redo mine even though it's been carried from ME to ME2.

It's annoying I have to do it, but it's the rough facial choices (at least for a female character) that make it painful.
And why are most of the hair options so clumpy?
Wondering who has eyes like that,
Ray

I guess it comes down to the fine details - how things are presented, how epic things feel, how much they draw me in, how it plays, etc. - but I am concerned that this is just another re-release of the first game.

ME: Start from nothing, go build a team, go to an endgame fight.

ME2: Start from death, build a team, go to an endgame fight.

ME3: Start from a weak spot, build a team, go to an endgame fight.

I played the first two games and they were okay, but certainly not the amazing works of art that some people make them out to be - the story feels too limited and it is not a particularly strong, deep RPG or shooter. To date, the AI of the teammates has been fairly lacking as well.

Either way, here is to hoping they got the mix right this time. If not, I guess this will just be version 3.0 of the behind cover shooter release.

I have not read the reviews in detail - please, please, please, please, please tell me that planet scanning has been removed...
Worst part of the entire series.
Wondering what part of the story needs to be purchased to be seen,
Ray

Well, toss the 7850 in the garbage bin, but the 7870 doesn't look too bad. However, nViDiA is "shipping" in a week, I am eagerly awaiting the reviews on that line.
The money is just burning in my pocket!
Likely buying either the 7850 or whatever Nvidia's card is,
Ray

So sad - every time I see this game's title, I end up thinking about N.O.L.F.
Sorry, Creston, F.E.A.R. is dead to me.
Wishing they would announce a new one already,
Ray

Graphically, id gave up on any real type of consistency outside of framerate. I don't care if image A looks great if image B looks like total crap. I would far prefer a game that looks consistently good with a good framerate. Toss in real time degradation of graphics, in-screen texture updating, and numerous drivers bugs, it really feels like a graphics failure.

Can you say fugly?

Even looking directly at the "unique texture" argument, a number of textures are repeated, a number of zones are repeated, a number of NPCs are repeated, etc. Further, the unique textures are greatly absent from the actual play zones. You get some nice vistas or sky boxes, but you cannot actually go and look at any of those things - your character is stuck on the narrow, linear path.

But, as others have noted, the game failed at reaching greatness for so many reasons other than the graphics. The bugs? The AI? The confined gameplay? The pointless world hubs? The good, but completely underutilized vehicle component? The weak gun play? The terrible story? The weak UI? Broken economy? Boring gameplay?
The game was weak, and graphically, the highs did not surpass the lows.
Thinking Quake is the last id game I really enjoyed playing,
Ray

This comment was edited on Mar 3, 2012, 05:37.

It showed up on my list last night and I tried to run it, but it downloaded for a little bit and then told me that it had to convert my download to a new file format.

It ran overnight for eight hours and ended up doing nothing at all - I canceled it and moved on.
Fail.
Guessing it was not meant to be,
Ray