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| For what it's worth, I'm still playing it by Fortinbras 11/22/2007, 4:55pm PST | ||||
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| In spite of losing five hours worth of work on three consecutive occassions to geometry-stick and an infinite "LOADING..." screen I've still logged almost 20 hours in two days on it. The planet-exploration aspect reminds me a lot of Starflight, surveying minerals and driving around rovers across featureless (but unique-textured for each planet) alien terrain. I did that stuff for almost the entire first day. Some of the planets you don't even land on, just travel to and scan it without even having to land, akin to Smugglers 3.
- Conversation system is not quite as context-sensitive as the '06 trailer says. I've never interrupted someone mid-sentence to press a gun to their chin. Rather than a Persuade/Intimidate roll when you use the charisma skills they're simply greyed out if you have insufficient skillpoints invested. The Intimidate skill is less about being an asshole and more about pulling a gun on people, which I found fairly refreshing. On some areas they recycle the dialogue despite whatever response you choose, I've repeated dialogue trees multiple times and maybe 20% of the time it doesn't matter which path you pick. - The side-quest areas are numerous and use recycled maps, but they're short enough that I didn't seem to mind. You get there quickly, your ATV can mostly climb any sort of terrain, and the firefight lasts a couple of minutes. - Opponent AI is mostly decent, but you'll be breaking your controller in frustration as these big gigantic turtle-guys blitz you and punch you in the face, while your pistol-whipping in retaliation doesn't seem to do a damn thing. There's a cover system, which keeps combat tolerable at worst. - Loading and performance is chaotic. At regular loading areas (airlocks & elevators) the game covers it up with a bit of radio news broadcast or some other background activity to distract you but I noticed as my console started whirring more and more loudly I saw the game freeze up and display a loading pause more and more often, sometimes in the middle of hallways. A lot of reviews are expecting an XBox Live update, but with Bioware's QA reputation I'm not predicting a patch. Performance drops for massive gunfights in a couple of the main storyline areas. You'll notice corpses will disappear in about 2 seconds. It's chugged twice, once when you're bumrushed by a group of rabid animals and once during a big firefight, both in storyline areas. It doesn't seem to happen with the generic installations. I hope this helps clarify what I meant. |
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This really looks like a lot of fun by 11/09/2007, 10:24pm PST  The reviews seem to indicate by 11/10/2007, 8:14am PST Good Conversation. Good Combat. Awful Bugs. NT by 11/22/2007, 2:07pm PST Dammit, 360 games - why won't you let me love you? NT by 11/22/2007, 3:59pm PST For what it's worth, I'm still playing it by 11/22/2007, 4:55pm PST |
