Airship Ballet

Well-put. That third one though, right? I mean, gosh, just look at it. It's pretty great. Whoever made that must... phew, I mean they must have some talent.

Looks like people like the parchment. It certainly fits in with a lot of other loading screens and is functionally the most fitting to the game's setting, but not necessarily the mood of the map. I think once the hand's gone it'd be the best.

I think you should use the picture in #4 as the loading screen.

I wouldn't place too much sway on what Total Bitchtits Biscuit has to say. He has a terrible elitist attitude for one and he's ironically pretty awful when it comes to actually playing games, and that contributes his infamous whining. He rarely reviews games, but rather plays them and complains that he's not doing well live. That's after talking over an options menu for half an hour. Still, glad I didn't waste money on the pre-order. It's got the good, it's got the bad and it's got the ugly. One of those games I'll enjoy at times and curse in others, but not for full price.

:o I should probably say I absolutely adore it but don't like it when compared to my preferred sneaky loot missions. Love it in general, dislike it when put in the middle of Thief's sneaky-sneak campaign. The only mission I've ever disliked is The Mage Towers, and that's because of the abundance of tile/metal and the annoying platforms in the Air tower that are intentionally set up to make you wait. I just generally don't like the direction the game takes after Undercover, and The Lost City by proxy.

"'alloooooo"

That's a really naive, simplified way of looking at it and it's just not how the industry works. They don't greenlight projects off sales alone, and if they did they wouldn't have chosen to bring Thief back from the dead. It's easy to infer that given games like Call of Duty, but they simply re-use a formula that they know works while advancing everything around that. Every game has come back with more content. Granted they've become scummier with every release, just like Assassin's Creed and every other big AAA clone series, but that's the publishers' fault. The studio will be called on to make a game and then left until the next project. Ubisoft, for example, had a studio make Far Cry 3. They then told them they could make whatever they wanted, and Blood Dragon came out. In this case, there's a stranglehold on the studio to make the game accommodating to idiots, and accommodating to idiots it is. It's not based on sales, it's based on target audience research and pre-emptive accessibility for the widest number of people they can possibly envelope from those audiences. If they can't, they'll just change the theme until they can. That's why AAA games are typically so easy and simple in terms of design: you have to avoid excluding as many people as you can while making it and keep it inoffensive and accessible to all. Indie developers release games with a very specific audience in mind that will have a niche gameplay direction and offer something unique as the gears for their game. AAA games will be generic as all hell and just use their chosen theme as paint for pre-existing gears. As a side note, people need to stop confusing watered-down and bad, getting themselves worked up in the process. Watered-down is Dishonored, bad is any German simulator game of your choice.

I actually just quite enjoy playing video games and couldn't care less how capitalist capitalists are in a capitalist capitalism.

True, but I'm only buying a sub-par AAA game because we have a dual income and a shared Steam account.

Just the "even if it is" made it sound derogatory

Whaaaat? Opposing Force was great! Same for Blue Shift and Decay!

You sound like something straight out of a Steam community hub rant. Have you just installed a mission and missed the new button that appears in the top left in the New Mission screen?

Anybody who wants them can have them. The cards are just there because I'm too lazy to cut them out.

A lot of people work better one-on-one, that's just simple psychology. Even the most confident of public speakers will think far more clearly when it's just you and them in the room. I would worry all week about a foreign language speaking exam, and then when I got into the little broom closet they were always hosted in, I was as confident as I was in Finnish with my own mother. If it had been in an equally relaxed situation but with two more people, I would have been a lot less lucid. I think the bottom line is that you have to know you're in charge but not think like you are when talking to your co-workers. You will always act differently once the seed has been planted that you're one higher than they are but you have to make a conscious effort not to. When it comes to problem solving you have to act as a leader; you have to be calm, cool and assertive. When not, you need only act on their level and forget you have any technical superiority at all. If you do, they'll value your opinion when cooperation matters and rank is pulled. I've been working with the same people under me for years now and I know their preferences inside out. I can order in food without having to ask what people want and they'll be confident enough to just come and tell me if they want something different. That attitude and mutual understanding is what keeps a team working well together. It's not how enthusiastic or optimistic you are, not how loud and confident you can be and not how much small-talk you force. When it comes down to it, it's what doesn't need to be said that keeps people working efficiently and happily. People just want to work, really, and then go home and be their own person or go for the work night out, or whatever. In this case almost everybody in the office is a smart, cynical nerd. They all like to be left to their own devices and, if they find a problem, will ask around and eventually come to me if their problem hasn't been solved. I'm empathetic as can be when I give out jobs because I'm lumped with the more diplomatic tasks between departments as well as the grunt work. As far as I've come to know, the most important thing is to speak on their level and try to forget you're not on their level until it's a conundrum or a crisis you've all come up against and you need a leader to organise things. Beyond that, empathy and personal space. I'm head of network security, management and IT support at a hospital by the way, if anybody missed it wherever I posted it last. It's all in the same office. I get called out as much as everybody else but it's usually only related to intranet connection and borked databases messed up by somebody in data entry. I have to manage the department budget and order in new hardware. I set things up on-site and others maintain them, especially the security. On paper it's a very relaxed and flexible job but anybody with a similar job will know how astoundingly often people manage to break things.

I'm in charge of people too! I never really changed my frame of mind though, either because they're a bunch'a dormant computer nerds or because I'm mute. Everything's done via email and nobody really socializes much. That's because they're all introverted though, rather than all hating one another. They work fairly well without being interrupted and email serves to dish out jobs so I can't contribute to the attitude side of the topic. The important thing to always keep in mind is that you're all human. Don't get too pretentious in your enthusiasm or people will just groan inwardly and end up treating you differently. Keep it casual and maybe avoid assaulting your poor office furniture.

There's this ridiculously nostalgic Army Men game that everybody I've ever mentioned it to played like crazy and forgot all about. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4uMm91GmNc

Things that drag it down, but nothing that drags it down to actual "bad" status as a whole; things that simply could have been done better. DE:HR was mediocre. It had a brilliant soundtrack and visuals but shitty gunplay, bad boss fights, binary skill path that meant you either could or couldn't progress a certain way without knowing beforehand, repetitive gameplay, terrible AI, crappy pseudo-didactic storyline with the ending-o-matic machine rendering it all irrelevant as a final middle finger to anybody attempting to buy the sloppy illuminati/human nature direction. It rewarded you XP for using a vent, pressing Q while within a mile radius of two guards, opening a door, using a computer or picking your nose. If you mess up stealth you can blast your way out, mess that up you can quick-save and eat chocolate bars while sprinting at people and mashing Q. It's easy, it's lowest common denominator, it's all-inclusive, it's stylized and cinematic and it's as simple and binary as an RPG you can make without taking away the G. Dishonored was a compromise, it was a real compromise. You can flash around wherever you like, murder people just as easily as put them to sleep, see them through walls, have an item that literally points you towards every collectible you'll ever need and have exposition and hints delivered to you NPC dialogue about as subtle as a little robot arm coming out of your mask and handing you the script. It never got too complicated in terms of gameplay or story for the youngest of kids (with bad parents) to play to their heart's content. It was pretty, it was stylized, it was simple, it was easy, it was forgiving and predictable and overly rewarding and condescending and so on and so forth. They're easy, they're casual games. That's what they do: appeal to everybody and remain as inoffensive as possible. Stay easy and simple to follow and you'll pull in all the people who just want a nice, entertaining game to play for 10 hours or so that they'll have fond memories of. That's AAA games and that's what Dishonored, DE:HR, Tomb Raider, Bioshock Infinite, Sim City, Lost Planet 3, Resident Evil 6, Dead Space 3, Final Fantasy Whatever We're On Now and Splinter Cell Blacklist all aimed for so they can move copies. No matter the game you will find a lot of people with little gaming experience harping on about how great all of the above are. They won't be saying that Infinite had some fun gunplay or that Tomb Raider had great visuals but the rest was crap, they'll simply say "Tomb Raider was brilliant" because they get swept away and have no context or higher expectations given to them by decades having played games beforehand. Pop culture has always existed and producers in that field have always pandered to as many as they can to increase sales, not produce a revolutionary masterpiece. You'll notice the Devil May Cry reboot, The Last of Us and Metro Last Light, to name a few, were all under the public spotlight from day one, advertised to the AAA crowd and eaten up by them as well as the glorious veteran master race. They all succeeded in both cases because they were compelling, immersive or just generally great enough for the casual crowd to keep playing through the difficulty and the elements they were unfamiliar with. They stood up on their own and did something different to make their mark. They're games that are sold to the masses but are their own thing. Dishonored and DX:HR were not; they were easy games marketed to the many with the intent of being inoffensive and movable. When it comes down to it, DE:HR was fun, as was Dishonored. They were both a breeze and both fell foul of some terrible design choices but they were fun. I couldn't give less of a toss whether the dialogue in Thief is crass and cheesy, if the loot is like taking candy from a baby and if I can coast through without ever clashing swords with somebody. Because I'll have fun. I'm looking at it and I know that it looks fun. It looks easy, it looks predictable, it looks awkward and it looks mediocre as all hell but it looks fun. In the end what I'm buying is hours of fun, not whatever the Hell people seem to have been expecting. To be honest at this point I've given up trying to fathom what people wanted. People have said they wanted a game as good as the original Thief but not the same and then in the same breath said that they dislike innovation and want to go back to the late 90s. The bottom line is that if it isn't coming from an indie dev, it's safe to say that they won't take interest in any of your hopes and dreams that could compromise their ability to sell to the Everyman.

It's a game targeted at the masses. It's a AAA game produced by a AAA dev and a AAA publisher . I don't know what people expected other than mediocrity, despite them picking up a stellar franchise. Just look at what they did to Final Fantasy.

It just seems mediocre to me. It's been railed like crazy and a lot of people are still beating the dead horse but to me it just seems mediocre. I've seen nothing at all that's bad. Nothing has made me cringe or get angry and nothing I've seen has particularly struck me as bad. It's simply uninspired and unambitious. I think the reason a lot of people are calling it awful is because they had high hopes and the game has fallen very far from those, hence they have a harsher response. I was cynical when it was a rumour years ago and I've been cynical right up until I saw gameplay footage. When I did, I saw that it was just okay. Good in parts, meh for the rest.

It very much was and will be

You wouldn't chuckle at them in Wurm Online. They scare me so bad and I have no fear of spiders.

Less-than-classy dialogue in a decaying city? Ah yeah, because the thuggish guy in TDM who does nothing but talk about whores is very classy.

Huh, I'd actually just read all the anti-hype on here and seen no straight-up gameplay until this morning. Watching those streams actually made me more positive towards it.