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Pavlov posted:Man I would play the gently caress out of a game that takes place in fantasy Great Zimbabwe. For a moment I was like wait yes a toto-themed game would be amazing. I was hummin along, but then it got all geographical
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 12:14 |
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# ? Mar 29, 2024 06:50 |
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Kubla Khan posted:Have you tried Heroine's Quest? It's free. http://www.crystalshard.net/hq.htm Heroine's Quest is probably the better of the two, as far as I've heard. Still haven't finished it though, due to OCD about missing points.
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 12:24 |
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evilmiera posted:Heroine's Quest is probably the better of the two, as far as I've heard. Still haven't finished it though, due to OCD about missing points. Heroine's quest is an amazing tribute to the QFG games; highly recommended if you like them. Haven't heard good things about Quest for Infamy, but haven't tried it myself.
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 12:42 |
Inspector Gesicht posted:
I still have a much older copy so can't say. There were a number of patches but this fansite still has links to them all up if the GOG version doesn't include them. The main thing to be aware of (and even a lot of dedicated fans of the game don't know this) is that the patched game still has a bug where fire-resistance effects permanently boost all armor; i.e., drink a potion of fire resistance, even after it visually expires, that character will have permanent base armor improvement. Makes the endgame almost too easy, and not exploiting it makes other parts of the game a lot harder =(
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 13:09 |
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Dav posted:Heroine's quest is an amazing tribute to the QFG games; highly recommended if you like them. Heroines Quest is amazing, there is no reason not to play it.
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 14:19 |
Arkeus posted:...Why? DaggerFall and Arena fits into a type of game better than Skyrim arguably does, after all. No, because the gameplay is terrible, navigating endless spaghetti dungeons is a pain, and it's missing a billion other quality of life improvements that weren't even on the radar in 1996. There's a lot to do, but that's really all it has going for it. The mechanical systems behind how you do things is uniformly unfun. I can't say your opinion is wrong since you're entitled to it, but if you take an average person and let them play both Skyrim will be prefered 99.9% of the time.
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 14:22 |
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rope kid posted:Convince Feargus that people will buy/play it and I'll make it. I've been wanting to make a Darklands/Ars Magica style game for a long, long time. Do it in the Fading Suns universe and I'll sell my house and go live in a box to help pay for it.
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 15:02 |
MegaGatts posted:No, because the gameplay is terrible, navigating endless spaghetti dungeons is a pain, and it's missing a billion other quality of life improvements that weren't even on the radar in 1996. Arg, I typed up a big message then x'd out of the window and lost it. What I was going to say is that almost all the classics we're talking about have a huge problem: few players actually finish them. Partly it's the nature of sandbox games, partly it's that people are playing to build characters and once their character is "done" so are they, partly it's that generally building a "complete" character trivializes the game's challenges. The Elder Scroll games all have all of these problems together -- the writing is at best "good for a video game," they're huge sprawling open worlds with relatively weak main plotlines, you can get a "finished" character while only completing a fraction of the total content, and once you do "finish" your character, the rest of the game's content becomes trivial and hence boring (a problem that level scaling does not solve). It's not just those though; the same issue comes up to a lesser extent in Avernum, in Divinity: Original Sin, even in classics like, I have to admit it, Darklands -- most people don't bother to finish. A few games (Planescape:Torment, Deus Ex) get past that hurdle by just having objectively amazing writing, coupled with good game balance throughout so you never feel like the game has become trivial (of course, neither of those is really "sandbox.") A few (the Gold Box / Infinity Engine games) generally just don't let you actually "finish" your character -- i.e., in Pool of Radiance, you might max out your party at like level 8 or so, out of AD&D's twenty levels (the idea being you'd carry your party over to the sequel). PS:Torment also put a lot of character-building decisions in the end sequence, so if you wanted to get the "best" character you had to finish that thing out. The more I think about this issue the stranger it is to me. Why are so many classic games usually left unfinished? How many people never bother to finish their favorite book?
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 15:03 |
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Arg, I typed up a big message then x'd out of the window and lost it. What I was going to say is that almost all the classics we're talking about have a huge problem: few players actually finish them. Partly it's the nature of sandbox games, partly it's that people are playing to build characters and once their character is "done" so are they, partly it's that generally building a "complete" character trivializes the game's challenges. I think it's a problem with free form RPGs in general. Without a strong narrative hook there's no incentive to continue playing. Video games are a hard medium to get a hook going unless you abandon the strengths of a video game to set the plot in motion. This is how pretty much every RPG does it, either through cutscenes or scripted on rails content. This isn't a problem with say action games because the enjoyment of playing something like Ninja Gaiden is actually playing Ninja Gaiden. In an RPG the joy is in creating a character, advancing the plot, interacting with NPCs, finding loot, leveling up, and if the game is good finally gameplay. In a lot of the classic RPGs the gameplay wasn't good even when all the other parts are, and since you spend most of a game actually playing it finishing it can be a chore. I think anyone who played Arcanum all the way through will agree the game was great... except when you were playing it. In my opinion there are two problems. A lot of RPGs aren't fun to play and(with open world free form RPGs) telling a story without taking control away from the player is hard as hell.
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 15:19 |
MegaGatts posted:I think it's a problem with free form RPGs in general. Without a strong narrative hook there's no incentive to continue playing. Video games are a hard medium to get a hook going unless you abandon the strengths of a video game to set the plot in motion. This is how pretty much every RPG does it, either through cutscenes or scripted on rails content. Yeah, that's a lot of it. I remember the contrast between the two Dragon Age games really markedly. Origins had really fun tactical gameplay throughout so that every battle was an interesting challenge and it kept me playing the whole way through, coupled with pretty good writing that kept me interested. The second one, the plot had me for the first half, refugee, poverty, new life in a new city -- then I got a pimpin' house and personal wealth. Problem solved! At that point, as far as I was concerned, the game was finished. Never picked it up again.
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 15:45 |
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rope kid what is the minimum damage supposed to be? I've seen slashing weapons doing 1 damage minimum, but piercing and crushing seem to do less minimum damage (like 0.6 or something)
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 15:49 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah, that's a lot of it. I remember the contrast between the two Dragon Age games really markedly. Origins had really fun tactical gameplay throughout so that every battle was an interesting challenge and it kept me playing the whole way through, coupled with pretty good writing that kept me interested. The second one, the plot had me for the first half, refugee, poverty, new life in a new city -- then I got a pimpin' house and personal wealth. Problem solved! At that point, as far as I was concerned, the game was finished. Never picked it up again. Only a moderator would dare opening that can of worm!
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 15:59 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah, that's a lot of it. I remember the contrast between the two Dragon Age games really markedly. Origins had really fun tactical gameplay throughout so that every battle was an interesting challenge and it kept me playing the whole way through, coupled with pretty good writing that kept me interested. The second one, the plot had me for the first half, refugee, poverty, new life in a new city -- then I got a pimpin' house and personal wealth. Problem solved! At that point, as far as I was concerned, the game was finished. Never picked it up again. Dragon Age 2 suffered from a multitude of problems, which is a shame because it had some genuinely interesting characters and the city was rather well done. One of my main beefs with Bioware games has always been the way they do DLC. I remember getting the pre-order bonus and thinking the magic shop in the city was weirdly disjointed from the main game, it was basically a tacked on map icon full of overpowered gear and it was never referenced anywhere. I didn't stop playing it myself when I got past the first story point but it did mark the point where it became a chore, at this point the game would not introduce any new environments and combat would spawn ever more enemies. I did like the aesthetics of the combat though, it was flashy and cool and I didn't at all mind the more cinematic style.
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 16:08 |
Furism posted:Only a moderator would dare opening that can of worm! Hahah, oh poo poo, I forgot that was A Thing :P Whoops! My bad! I didn't get Steam until Skyrim came out, so all the big screaming matches were already long over by the time I got around to catching up on the Dragon Age series. Hell, I only played Avernum for the first time earlier this year. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Sep 17, 2014 |
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 16:11 |
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Sensuki posted:rope kid what is the minimum damage supposed to be?
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 17:23 |
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That's before DT and modifiers included? I'm pretty sure I've seen cases where they're doing less than that if that's the case. But I'd have to double check.
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 17:28 |
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Incoming, before armor is applied.
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 17:44 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:( about people not finishing open-form RPGs) Is this actually a problem, per se? I mean, if people play a game, play it to satiation, enjoy it, and then stop- does that have no value, if they don't check every box? This goes doubly for open-world, sandbox games- if there's no defined goal, then how do you define completion? 100%-ing every sidequest? That's an exercise for lunatics. (Also: if I recall correctly, the vast majority of all games suffer from a high non-completion rate; it's by no means a phenomenon restricted to free-form RPGs.)
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 19:26 |
Autonomous Monster posted:Is this actually a problem, per se? I mean, if people play a game, play it to satiation, enjoy it, and then stop- does that have no value, if they don't check every box? This goes doubly for open-world, sandbox games- if there's no defined goal, then how do you define completion? 100%-ing every sidequest? That's an exercise for lunatics. Good question. I think it does at least to the extent that it demonstrates a flaw in the storytelling. I mean, I don't stop reading a book midway through unless it's *really* bad. With games that don't *have* stories or where the stories are minimal, it seems like less of an issue, but if the game is trying to tell a story and also not holding people's interest to the conclusion of the story, I think that's a problem. Of course, most books don't require me to click thousands and thousands of skeletons over and over again for hours until I get arthritis flareups in my hands (lookin' at you, Diablo), either.
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 19:48 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Arg, I typed up a big message then x'd out of the window and lost it. What I was going to say is that almost all the classics we're talking about have a huge problem: few players actually finish them. Partly it's the nature of sandbox games, partly it's that people are playing to build characters and once their character is "done" so are they, partly it's that generally building a "complete" character trivializes the game's challenges. It's easier to finish books than games. 1. They generally take less time. Even some of the ridiculously long fantasy epics that certain fantasy writers are fond of writing take about the same amount of time as a regular game to finish. For example, take a typical long fantasy epic like The Eye of the World (Wheel of Time Book 1). It's ~700 pages long. A typical reader takes about 1-1.5 hours to read 100 pages, so in this case it would take them 7-10.5 hours to read the book. Taking a quick look at howlongtobeat.com Baldur's Gate takes 42 hours to finish the main story, Baldur's Gate 2 takes 18, Icewind Dale 34 hours, Icewind Dale 2 47 hours, and Plancescape: Torment 37 hours. 2. Video Games have difficulty. The only way someone is unable to finish a book is if they get so bored/disgusted by it's contents they don't want to. With games, sometimes a player is just unable to get past a certain point because of it's difficulty. A certain fight/level might be too hard, a puzzle might be too difficult to solve, or there is a certain path they have to take that they just miss because they weren't on the same page as the developer.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 00:57 |
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rope kid, how difficult would it be to add back the screen shake on a gib, maybe as a toggle? There some something so satisfying about hitting someone so hard they exploded and the entire world rocks back and forth.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 02:07 |
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rope kid posted:Convince Feargus that people will buy/play it and I'll make it. I've been wanting to make a Darklands/Ars Magica style game for a long, long time. This would be a Day 1 purchase for me.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 05:06 |
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Look at Codespells for your Ars Magica/freeform magic stuff.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 07:00 |
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Cthulhuite posted:rope kid, how difficult would it be to add back the screen shake on a gib, maybe as a toggle? There some something so satisfying about hitting someone so hard they exploded and the entire world rocks back and forth.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 07:30 |
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rope kid posted:Would you believe a rogue's arrow could cause a lion to explode into flying chunks of bloody lion meat? I've seen it with my own eyes. That sounds like one of my favorite GMs. "Okay, so your monk caught the fleeing bandit by surprise. Prepared attack, ki strike, improved unarmed strike, on a called shot to the groin... *roll* Okay, you kick the bandit in the balls as hard as you can, annnd... *roll* his head explodes."
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 08:54 |
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rope kid posted:I think that's in now. Today we were doing a build review and all of the procedural blood/fire/electricity/acid/freeze hit effects are finally hooked up + gibs on a crit kill + the gibs have fire/electricity/acid/freeze particles if that's what killed them. Would you believe a rogue's arrow could cause a lion to explode into flying chunks of bloody lion meat? I've seen it with my own eyes. Beautiful.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 09:31 |
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This is good news because Wasteland 2 releases tomorrow. I would get a mental freeze if I had to choose between a new build of PoE and WL2.Adam Brennecke posted:We still got a few bugs that we would like to fix internally before the next release (some make certain things unplayable). Our target was this Thursday, but now we are looking to push early next week if everything goes well tomorrow and Friday.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 09:50 |
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Have Obsidian released their GOG keys yet for Wasteland?
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 09:55 |
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Hank Morgan posted:Have Obsidian released their GOG keys yet for Wasteland? I got mine already.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 11:16 |
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Earlier there was talk about tinkering with the attribute system a bit. I think ropekid said they were considering having perception affect the cast range of spells & abilities. What if it did the same for ranged attacks as well? Set the bonus & base ranges so that you get the "normal" screen lenght ranges with average perception. The effect doesn't have to be (and really shouldn't, IMO) be all that huge, but it'd be a nice feelsy solution to the problem some people have with there not being a separate attack atribute for ranged combat. A high perception character could do some cool/cheesy stuff by attacking outside of his own vision range if he's got a friendly unit working as a spotter, and could negate the drawbacks of medium range weapons (if there any, IE games had darts) in "standard" play.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 11:34 |
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Munin posted:I got mine already. Just tried generating and it just gave me a steam key which I didn't want.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 11:49 |
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Hank Morgan posted:Just tried generating and it just gave me a steam key which I didn't want. Oh, sorry misread that. I got a steam key.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 12:03 |
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A lot of folks here have probably seen that, but here's a preview of the new Torment game (it's using Obsidian's tech): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd43NYBzHuk.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 12:10 |
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Munin posted:Oh, sorry misread that. I got a steam key. It's all good. Apparently I had another key from my original WL2 pledge that I could use. First world problems.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 12:27 |
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verybad posted:I think ropekid said they were considering having perception affect the cast range of spells & abilities. What if it did the same for ranged attacks as well? I'm not really a fan of that one to be honest. With a lot of buffs you want the caster to be affected himself as well as his party, so long ranged buff casting wouldn't be very beneficial in that sense because you'd still have to go in closer to get everyone. And a lot of casters have auras. So naturally you wan't them to be fairly close in. I think this kinda stuff negates the usefulness of attribute-influenced range - not an avenue I'd consider going down tbh. There is probably a way to balance Perception (minus Interrupt) against Might, I can think of a few but Matt hasn't been free to converse with me about them yet. One off the top of my head is increasing the value of Might (and Constitution) to 3% up from 2% and also raising Accuracy (and Deflection) to +2 per point (as well as IAS to 3%). Then they would be much closer in terms of raw efficacy. This would mean a bit of rebalancing though, and Shield and Item Deflection bonuses might need a tweak as well. That would also mean defenses could be calculated as (Att A + Att B) * 2, rather than 1.5. That is just one way, there are others. Sensuki fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Sep 18, 2014 |
# ? Sep 18, 2014 13:23 |
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omeg posted:A lot of folks here have probably seen that, but here's a preview of the new Torment game (it's using Obsidian's tech): Looks nice.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 13:46 |
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One idea I considered as a way to buff perception was to add in damage penetration. But I can't see how it could work well - it would be too powerful against armour unless the bonus was a fraction of one DT point. And something like 0.25 DT penetration seems sort of messy. I also considered for a while maybe swapping the bonuses of Resolve and Int as proposed in the S&M manifesto so Int was Concentration + Deflection (Intellectually predicting attacks to avoid them, and concentrating seems intellectual as well), and Resolve was Duration + AoE (Determination driving abilities to last longer or spread wider). Yet that might encourage imbecilic mages, which would be no good.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 14:01 |
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Sensuki posted:I'm not really a fan of that one to be honest. With a lot of buffs you want the caster to be affected himself as well as his party, so long ranged buff casting wouldn't be very beneficial in that sense because you'd still have to go in closer to get everyone. And a lot of casters have auras. So naturally you wan't them to be fairly close in. I think this kinda stuff negates the usefulness of attribute-influenced range - not an avenue I'd consider going down tbh. I like the range thing because because it changes the way different parties approach combat. Low perception party might be optimally played as a aura-buff stacking hugbox, while a high perception party is an artillery company with a spotter. Balancing just the numbers will make different stat arrays equally viable, but adds very little tactical depth. If it's just special abilities that are affected though, I don't really see it making that much of a difference, because your engagement range is still going to be determined by your ability to do damage, ie. normal attacks. verybad fucked around with this message at 14:41 on Sep 18, 2014 |
# ? Sep 18, 2014 14:33 |
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verybad posted:I like the range thing because because it changes the way different parties approach combat. Low perception party might be optimally played as a aura-buff stacking hugbox, while a high perception party is an artillery company with a spotter. Balancing just the numbers will make different stat arrays equally viable, but adds very little tactical depth. Well the areas themselves are 'smaller' in scale than the Infinity Engine games relative to character size, and there'll be a lot of melee enemies. If pulling one guy pulls the nearby ones, I can't really see there being too much of that, YMMV tho.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 15:18 |
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# ? Mar 29, 2024 06:50 |
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omeg posted:A lot of folks here have probably seen that, but here's a preview of the new Torment game (it's using Obsidian's tech): Goddamn. I'm excited.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 16:44 |