just been watching some videos of the new upcoming rpg from bioware. i'm not really that impressed. once you get past the over the top wank job hype of the project director narrating them, there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of new stuff in the gameplay to get you excited. they show a lot of cut scenes, a little bit of talking and a little bit of combat. the npc dialog seems a bit overly cheesy. your character doesn't have voice acting, i was thinking that after mass effect, even though (i assume) in this game you create your own character name and stuff, they might have recorded the lines still. the dialog trees are in the kotor style, ie pick option 1-4 or whatever, instead of mass effect where you choose more of the style of response you want and the character says it.

they show a bit where you are running around exploring the castle and come up to a prisoner in a cage, the choice the guy made was killing him to take a key he stole. HOLY CRAP LOOK AT THE HUGE CHOICE WE JUST MADE THAT IS GOING TO IMPACT THE REST OF THE WORLD!! wtf. the combat is like kotor it seems, which i really liked so no issues real issues there. you can pause to cast spells and use skills but there didn't seem to be any queues to set out attacks like in kotor, it seemed to be just a generic 'you click on the bad guy and he attacks'. your party members yell out taunts and stuff during the fight which i liked. one of the hyped up things was using spell combinations, the example was using a 'grease' spell to cover an area with grease, then using a fire spell to set it on fire and damage the enemies. if someone does that to you, you cast a blizzard spell to put the fire out. i'm not sure what use the grease spell has apart from waiting to be set on fire as nobody fell over while running through it or fighting in it.

the graphics look pretty good, the characters are really detailed. except scabbards don't seem to exist, so your sword seems to be floating on your back, stuck with magic invisible glue. its a bit weird. im just judging all this from watching a few videos, im sure it would be pretty fun to play, its just the hype from this dan tudge or something is huge in the videos and while watching you think 'well its not that groundbreaking'. is anyone else looking forward to this or seen the videos too?

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new set online, Summer Journeys