wesp5

I always thought it was supposed to be Doom4 and they only changed the name as rebooting seems to be sooo cool these days. Although Doom3 was a reboot already, or was it not? And what do you mean by the other undelivered Doom project?

I agree to that, it sounds like a good idea and if hard-core players don't like it, they can turn it off in options!

Storyline? I thought it was more or less just a parody on western shooter .

Yeah, Gunslinger is great! Not only are there too few western shooter anyway, but the game is really funny: whenever the narrator get's corrected by his listeners, the game will change on the spot !

I didn't mean their failed episodes, but the delay of HL2 itself which they used the code theft as a scapegoat for. Read about it here: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-final-hours-of-half-life-2/1100-6112889/

Oh, and you still believe anything Newell says? Remember the HL2 delay and all the lies he spread at the time? You really believe Valve would allow some other company to set the Steam prices without fixing their cut where they want it to be?

Agreed! Dedicated communities are needed to keep modding alive, like the ModDB, the Nexus, TDM or Planet Phillip. Also I had the impression that Valve/Bethesda didn't really care about the modders, but only on getting themselves a high share out of greed for actually doing little more than pulling their Steam-monopoly string.

So Valve/Bethesda get $350 before the author even sees one cent? And refunds can only be cashed in on Steam and thus even failed mods give Valve money in the end! Wow, this is where monopoly leads to: They think they can get away with anything...

Rumours are 75% of revenue are going to Valve/Bethesda and 25% to the creator. Now who is getting the bigger share here?

The problem with donating is that it would mean no free money for Valve from other people's work! In my opinion they have been exploiting mods for years already either by copying them or pimping them up or buying them out (CS, TF2, L4D1/2, Portal1/2, DOTA2) and this is only one more step to try to get all of gaming into their Steam monopoly. They attacked IndidDB with Greenlight, now ModDB with that and I really hope it finally breaks the straw for all Valve fanboys out there who still don't recognize that Valve is becoming a hybrid of Apple and Facebook, only out there for the money and not anymore for the games!

I don't know if this is easily possible, but I do know that a city hub like this has been requested a lot of times here already ! You could handle starting seperate missions by selecting them on a board at a fence or something similar, like e.g. RAGE did do it. If someone would build a city map like this, it could include some training missions itself and could move the whole now external FM interface inside the game world. Then any discussions whether TDM is a game or a toolset would be moot for ever. So go ahead and build this city hub and I'm sure when it's good enough, people will think about including it !

I think Vampire: The Masquerade has already been mentioned, but there are other lost gems out there. Although all of the following FPS/RPG hybrids are quite buggy, they are still surprisingly freeroam and fun: "Boiling Point", it's sequel or prequel "White Gold", and especially "The Precursors" from DeepShadows! The last two are hard to find as they were never released retail in the west, but they should still be availble from GamersGate or other smaller distribution services. I patched these versions !

Hm, it seems you need to activate the voice recognition by pressing the mouse button, so they could easily have you select the spell with the mouse wheel and cast it with the mouse button. So inside this game it's rather a kind of gimmick! Under other circumstances, e.g. in a game where you were actively fighting with weapons and were busy with all fingers already occupied, something like this to cast a spell at the same time would make more sense!

While I was adding some unused tracks to the Unofficial Patch for Bloodlines I had a brief contact with the composer, Rik Schaffer. It may be interesting to some here what he wrote about his work because it may be true for the music in other games as well: Of all the games I have worked on in the 15 years I've been doing this Bloodlines was the best because I was given free reign to write music without censor and drawing from my own life experiences. This is where the best music comes from for an artist.

I agree to that but in my opinion it wasn't because of the console focus but because of the megatexture implementation. When I first played it on a dualcore it just didn't look good at all with textures popping in when you turned fast with the mouse. Later on a newer quad core it was one of the most impressive games I ever played! With more gameplay and characters and story than any other id game before as well ...

I was only talking about the first optical impression. The DX Chinatown looks like every other part except for the Chinese banners. The Bloodlines Chinatown looks much prettier !

If you mean sidequests by this, you don't need to go there. Still I agree that in that regard Chinatown is the weakest hub of Bloodlines as Troika was already running out of time or money when they did it.

I agree. Although not only the DX graphics have aged, but the whole game! DX's map design already seemed quite bland and forced to me when I first played it. Like everything is dark with little details and there is always the convenient vent to add another access route. This became even more obvious when I played Bloodlines, who offers a lot of similar gameplay choices, but in a much more detailed and lifelike environment. Just compare the Chinatowns of both games !

I agree to that! Compared to everything else id has released since Doom, RAGE delivered the best gameplay, characters and story. A shame that the whole game got dragged down by the stupid megatexture version it uses, which made it ugly on all systems that were too slow for it, like the consoles, and killed all modding as well ... As for DXHR, I played it but found the story so convoluted that I forgot most of it once I was finished. That's the same impression I remember from the original DX which couldn't stop itself from adding one conspiration after another. And they repeated the original's problem to offer different endings that would mess up any sequel as well!

So what engine is it using? Still Unreal or Unity after their latest mobile converted to PC game?

Hm, but how many paintings are there in TDM? Maybe it's worth the effort in the end...

How about giving them a gilden frame or something similar to the shiny look of lootable goblets?

I'll try to take a look at this once the next Bloodlines Unofficial Patch is out...

Yes, I'm that Wesp5 and also the one doing the Unofficial VTM Bloodlines Patch ! As for the improvements: 1. add an option to download all new or updated missions in one go. 2. have duplicated missions removed and 3. have all series labeled. For the points 2. and 3., if there is a server text file similar to the local one, I could try and sort the names out. I understand that you have more pressing issues, just wanted to make sure that the front end is not getting forgotten !

So is nobody interested in improving the mission downloader or am I missing something obvious here?